My Life in Brain Injuries

It was Easter just after I turned three.  My mother, sisters & I, all dressed up for church, were arranged on the rail-less front porch with me, the smallest, in front.

I must have locked my knees while waiting for the camera-faced photographer, my father, to focus, focus, focus and shoot. I blacked out, a peculiar thing for a child, and pitched forward, falling face first onto the rock-hard ground.

Regaining consciousness in my father’s arms, my bloody nose making a mess of his starched white shirt and my frilly pink dress, I saw my sisters standing in front of us, their hands over their mouths, nervously giggling. In fact, I believe I remember the incident because everyone was laughing.

They were not a group of sadists. As an adult, I understand their laughter stemmed from relief. According to family legend, when I came to I looked at all the splatters and said, “Oh no! I’m going to lose all the protein out of my blood.” It was a peculiar concern for any small child to express and certainly, they believed, a sign I would be all right.

As I grew, I became known for my clumsiness. I took for granted that I was accident prone. It’s a common problem: One head injury tends to lead to another and another due to distortion in how the brain processes incoming information. For example, my visual processing became distorted. Prescription glasses made objects sharper in appearance but did nothing to improve my poor depth perception or poor judgment of speed and distance. Consequently, every game had the potential of being a contact sport. Tennis was a disaster because I was more likely to hit myself in the face with the racket than ever make contact with the ball.

As time went by, I was afraid of further injuries and embarrassing myself,  so I avoided physical activities. An upside to this is that I learned to read when I was four. My fine motor skills flourished because I sat and practiced drawing and perfecting my penmanship. Over time, I chose sedentary activities such as calligraphy rather than try to be physically active. Unfortunately, avoiding an active life just made me less sure of myself physically and even more uncoordinated, more prone to injury.