#nails post

The injury happened in the afternoon (details removed to protect the innocent!!!). I’ve hit my head as hard or harder before in my life and had no consequences other than headache, so I didn’t think much of it. It hurt, so I put an icepack on it and chatted with friends. In retrospect, 30min-1hr after the injury, I was already starting to feel a bit woozy. When talking, sometimes it was more difficult than usual to find the right word.

Later that night I drove to my parents’ house. I don’t believe I was driving unsafely and my car wasn’t difficult to operate (again, NOT medical or legal advice!). The first sign something was amiss was when my mom handed me a free-verse poem and I COULD NOT make head or tail of it. If you’d asked me to read it out loud, I could have concentrated extra hard and done it, but it was very difficult to make the words on the page form themselves into a narrative in my mind. Honestly, this was scary and a bit of a mindfuck! But I was in denial that anything was wrong, so I didn’t say anything.

My head continued to hurt (a sort of constant throb) into the next morning.

The next morning I drove to work. Reading emails was not an issue like the poem had been, but my executive function was even more broken than usual (or broken in a different way.) I had no queue in the back of my mind for what tasks needed to be done after the one I was working on. Multitasking was impossible. I also noticed my sense of time was off, and continued to occasionally stumble over words.

At that point it was very clear my brain was operating differently than normal. I called my doctor and went home sick.

For the next 10 days I stayed in my darkened room and avoided screens and reading of any kind, except to check my work email twice a day. My symptoms were fairly consistent during this time:

If I tried to read or look at my phone for too long, my head would start to hurt and I would get dizzy. I’d feel eyestrain within a few minutes, as if I had been on the computer all night. If I had “pushed through” and tried to continue reading for any length of time, or looking at bright light, I believe it would have impacted my recovery.

Any exertion made my head start to throb.

My sense of time was SO BAD! It’s never been good, but this was another level. I had no notion of how much time was passing--not just that, but you know how you usually have a sense of what time of day it is and how much of the day has gone by? Nope. I didn’t know if it was early morning or time for dinner. (Being in a dark room all day may have contributed to this.)

Same with my sense of where the current day was located in the week. I was eagerly waiting for the week to be up because that was the ballpark recovery time, but I had to count the days off on my fingers to figure out if the current day was closer to the end or the beginning of the week. My thought process word for word: “I know today is Thursday... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Three days before Thursday and one day after. That means the week is almost over.” It was WILD to realize I was thinking like this.

Again, random words would be hard to grab out of my vocabulary. It was just like when an obscure word is on the tip of your tongue, but it happened with words I use in everyday speech, like “vague” or “toaster.” Also, once I had hold of the right word, my certainty that it was the right word wasn’t nearly as strong as it usually is. I don’t remember numbers being hard, only words.

Nothing else was impacted. There are no gaps in my memory of the injury or the time after. I could still cook, do chores, and work on crafts. I knitted a lot of blanket squares and listened to a lot of youtube. It was frustrating as hell not being able to read or check social media or do anything except what I could do in low light, and I went a bit stir crazy, but I made it through :)

By the end of the 10 days my brain function was totally back to normal. I’d say it was noticeably better even by day 7.

Although my brain was working properly again, I was photosensitive for 3-4 months afterwards (it’s called post concussion syndrome and is not uncommon.) Looking at bright light or reading on screens gave me headaches, felt painful to my eyes, and made some of the dizziness I experienced in the first week come back. Setting websites and apps to dark mode, using orange filters like f.lux on my screen, and wearing blue-light filtering glasses helped with this.