Living with a traumatic brain injury and trauma really does lend itself to the saying, ‘if you have never experienced it, you just won’t understand.’ You try to be like your old self, or your normal and no matter what happens…something you’ve never experienced before rears its ugly head. It is true what they say, ‘Don’t take things for granted because you never know what could happen”, is taken to the extreme!
I can’t drop my kids off at school because the commotion of the people, vehicles, movement, noise – it makes me so sick to the point my brain feels like it will explode. My ‘level of tolerance’ as the treatment providers call it is about 2 hours. When I meet a friend for a lunch, little do they know that I must sleep for 2 – 3 hours afterwards just to recover. This coming from a woman who would get up at 6 am to workout before getting the kids up at 7 am and then not stopping until around midnight. This schedule repeated day after day. Some other wonderful side effects of an MVA are, yet not limited to, screen time (computer and television) gives me headaches; my wonderfully intelligent brain now struggles with sentence structure, word recall and spelling and even executive functioning. My love of music has been put on mute and my awesome dance parties with the kids have been put on hold. I keep hearing the term, ‘new normal’ – and that is very difficult to wrap my head around. Living 44 years is a long time. You acquire certain traits, characteristics and now to be told that that isn’t you anymore is a struggle. At the same time, I am being told that I am extremely high functioning. What does that even mean!? Lol! Until recently I didn’t understand this until my OT said something of brilliance.
Living with a traumatic brain injury and trauma really does lend itself to the saying, ‘if you have never experienced it, you just won’t understand.’