My Life in Brain Injuries

I’ve thought back many times and tried to reconstruct why we were going on a bike ride.  Why did the four of us – my college-age sister, my friend Gayle, my 5-year-old brother, and I – decide to ride in the Big Woods? We had never done anything like that before.  I don’t know why I borrowed a neighbor’s bike. He said to watch out; the hand brakes grabbed. I had never ridden a bike with hand brakes. I thought he meant I should use the pedal brakes. Wouldn’t a fancy bike have both?

So when we started down a slight decline in the trail, I pedaled back to slow but went faster. And faster. I think I may have screamed as I sped past my sister.

I don’t remember skidding on my face.

I do remember seeing only black and white when I came to – black trees, white sky. Gayle was standing over me, also black and white, telling me not to touch my face. So of course, I touched my face, looked at my fingers and wondered where all the tar had come from.

My sister and brother had ridden the five blocks back home and returned in her car. It was a sea-green VW bug with two racing stripes, bouncing as she drove it over the field to where we were. I thought, “This looks like Fellini did it.” But I don’t remember getting in the bug. I remember getting out of the family car at the nearest doctor’s office, not my regular doctor. I don’t remember what happened there or returning home.

The next time I came round, I was on the bed in my little brother’s room. I could hear Gayle’s father’s voice. He was talking to my parents in the living room, wanting to find out how I was, wanting to reassure his daughter that her friend would be OK. But then I passed out again and didn’t shake it off for a few days.

It was terribly embarrassing to start school – my freshman year – with a hamburger face and blood pudding eye. I was told how lucky I was to have that eye. It would’ve been easy for the breaking glasses to destroy it, but I was lucky.

I had an appointment to get braces on my teeth just over a week after the accident. Dr. Campbell, my orthodontist and a tender hearted soul, tried to talk me out of going through the process – at least until my face had healed – but I was determined to get my teeth straightened. The poor fellow was trying so hard not to make things worse, but to me the braces represented something positive. At least my teeth would be straight.

As anticipated, the visible signs of my injury faded over the next couple of months, but out of sight, inside my skull, things were starting to fall apart, at first slowly, but then with gathering speed. No one, however, connected the injuries with the problems and distorted thinking that eventually set in. Instead, the changes were chalked up to being a teenager. You know teenagers – they are so lazy, volatile, rude, self-absorbed, addled – just fill in the blank with a negative adjective.

At the end of the previous school year, I had been elected president of the next year’s choir. Singing in a choir had been a delight. The choir director clustered weaker singers around a strong singer so the others could tune in and rely on someone nearby hitting the right notes. I had been designated as one such strong singer, but over my freshman year, my capacity to match notes disintegrated as my auditory processing became distorted and the result was public humiliation. The choir director, who did not tolerate sloppy singing, berated me in front of the entire choir. I did not continue with music classes after ninth grade.

Eventually, distortion of my auditory processing made understanding casual speech difficult. I often “misheard” people or completely missed whole words or phrases. I became very self-conscious and dreaded having to ask people to repeat themselves but if I didn’t watch people’s lips when they spoke, I missed out on a great deal.

The accumulation of head injuries took a toll with my school work. Reading, a skill I had acquired early, one that had been an escape for me when other kids went skiing or skating, became difficult when words would often, but not always, disintegrate into marks on a page, holding no meaning. I thought I was losing my mind and confided in no one, convinced I would be institutionalized. The movie The Snake Pit had influenced my notion of mental health care and I was fearful of being “put away”.

As high school progressed, I threw myself into extracurricular activities because I wanted more than anything to be “normal”, something I definitely did not feel.  I simply could not keep up with my classmates academically and had to put in long hours to do homework that others got done in class. I hung on to a robust vocabulary but couldn’t spell worth beans. My math skills, if possible, worsened.  And, in the middle of all this, I did it again – my 7^th brain injury.