Two years, eight months, and four days ago, I went to the oral surgeon. They put me under. I woke up. I was terrified. I was crying. I asked, did something go wrong? They said nothing happened. One of the assistants seemed angry with me. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t stop crying. My friend Jordan was my ride. He was waiting in the parking lot. They wanted to go get him. I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to calm down first. I didn’t want him to see me like that. I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know why I was terrified. No one would tell me anything. Eventually I calmed down a bit. I was still pretty out of it. I don’t know how long it took, but if I had to guess, I’d say maybe twenty minutes. Jordan came in. They walked me to the car. Jordan drove me home. Jordan got my husband and they put me to bed. I slept and slept and slept. I was a mess. I had gauze in my mouth, and stitches, and I just wanted to rest.
That was on March 15th, 2021, which was a Monday. I think I worked that Tuesday. I can’t imagine how I worked Tuesday. Force of habit, I guess. I know I can’t have been feeling 100%. I haven’t felt 100% since before March 15th, 2021.
Tuesday night was when we found the bruises
We were laying in bed. And The Husband-Bot said Oh My God Your Arm. And I was like What Are You Talking About. And he said “Look.” and I Looked. And I was like, T, those are fingerprints. And he said “Yes, they are.” And we marveled.
I had a knot on the back of my head. I had bruising under my jaw. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to put even featherweight pressure under my chin. Someone had obviously restrained me with great force. Multiple someones. Someone had obviously slammed me back in the chair. I had been injured. But I didn’t know yet how injured I was.
March 15th, I went to the oral surgeon.
March 16th, we found the bruises.
March 17th, I emailed the oral surgeon to ask what the hell had happened.
And on March 18th, I figured out that there was something really wrong with me.
That’s when I knew I had a concussion.
Today is November 19th 2023. It has been two years, eight months, and four days since my most recent traumatic brain injury, and I have been well and truly fucked by it.
I saw my amazing doctor on March 23rd. She verified that I had a concussion, which at that point was a mere formality. By this point I had
- been bucked from a horse in 1985
- attempted (and very much failed) to pop a wheelie in 1987
- fainted and smacked my head against a wall in 1995
- gotten t-boned by a truck in 2011
I knew what a fucking concussion felt like.
On April 8th I facilitated a staff meeting but then started hallucinating like I’d eaten some excellent shrooms. It was then that I decided to take the rest of the day off and not to facilitate meetings for awhile.
Work was very understanding, if by understanding we mean that they said that they understood while actually making everything much harder and tilting their head like confused dogs when confronted with the fact that, yes, I still had a TBI and, yes, that actually did change some things and no, that wasn’t something I could just kinda, y’know, opt out of on weekdays or anything…
(fuck you kristin)
(I have a new job now)
The first three months after my injury I tried to behave as normal. I tried not to miss work, not to make excuses, not to slow down or change my routine in any way, and it almost killed me. I was getting worse instead of better. I couldn’t really sleep– it’s a sick irony of TBIs and that they can cause insomnia when what you need more than anything else is rest. So I was working eight hour days and sleeping about 4.5 hours a night and experiencing ungodly migraines, dizziness, ataxia, paraphasia, hallucinations, issues with word-finding, short-term memory loss, and a host of other issues that made me feel like I was going senile at 40. I was worried that I was losing myself. In June I broke down and ended up taking three weeks of leave out of desperation and sleeping as much as I could.
Part of the reason it felt imperative to take leave right then was that things had come to a head with my mother about her continuing pressure on me to have a relationship with my brother which I did not (and do not) want to do. I had to really break that down with her and put her on a time out, and this was very difficult for me emotionally. I wrote a rather lengthy blog post about this at the time if you feel like hunting it down. It’s not hard to find.
In September I received a two day unpaid suspension for goofing around on my work computer on the clock. When I pled that a lot of the things they cited were work-related, that in many cases I was trying to stay awake and alert when I ran out of tasks, and that my judgement and awareness of time were affected by my traumatic brain injury it fell on deaf ears. This is when I started to seriously believe that management was trying to get rid of me.
So at that point I was six months into my TBI adventure!
Throughout all of that I was trying very hard to be upbeat! Hopeful! To maintain my belief that healing was just! around! the corner!
Spoiler: no.
I got a new therapist around that time who was awesome! Her name was Jacey! And she was very good at helping me see the bright side of things. She felt like a friend. Our weekly sessions really helped keep me going. So that was great. My work situation still sucked ass, but at least I had someone to talk to about it.
And now I’m sitting here trying to think of other things that were happening in autumn 2021 and I can’t think of a fucking thing… I think I was just in survival mode, you know? Waiting for the good things I was sure were just right around the corner. I know I wrote a Christmas letter that year?
So I guess we can pick back up in Spring 2022.
MARCH: A year after my injury. I threaten to sue oral surgeon. He sends money. It isn’t a ton of money, but it’s all I’m going to get. I had to sign a NDA. We start shopping for a house in earnest. [We did not have “buy a house” money. We have “Oregon has great first time home-buying programs and we had hubris and now have SO MUCH DEBT OH MY GOD WHY DID WE DO THIS” money.] I hired the first realtors I met up with because I got a good feeling. They were a team who I’ll call Carrie and Fiona. I only meet Carrie the once, Fiona was our point of contact from then on.
APRIL: Jacey the therapist decides to leave the practice she’s at but super super pinkie swears she’ll totally for sure going to start up somewhere else to continue the super important work we were doing. I never see her again. This devastates me. I go into a terrible depression. The depression goes way past April. I am still in the depression. I do have a therapist currently, though.
MAY: HOUSE HUNT! We find a great-looking house and are about to bid on it when we discover that it was pretty much the site of a gun battle the year before and decide “nope.” We decide to confine our search to a certain part of town where we really want to live, which limits our options but makes us focus more.
JUNE/JULY: More house hunting. I have become obsessed. Travis keeps telling me to chill. I MUST HAVE A REWARD FOR ALL THE BULLSHIT I AM GOING THROUGH. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES KATE A DULL PSYCHOTIC MESS. We find a house which is MEH but for some reason Carrie the realtor (who T has never even MET) really wants us to buy it. It is dark and dank and a homeless dude lives in the shed and it isn’t at all what we want and there is no driveway and no back yard (and an awesome back yard is on our MUSTS list) but for some reason Carrie is like THIS IS YOUR HOME BUY IT. We do not buy it. There’s this other house that we wanted to look at but the residents got Covid so we couldn’t. But then a couple weeks pass and we’re like what about that one…….
So it’s July 27th and we go and we look at it and T is like DO NOT GET HOPES UP DO NOT FALL IN LOVE and we drag our friend Dan along like we usually do and I’m just walking through this house like uh-huh…. uh-huh……. hmmmm……. uh-huh….. and then I go in the back yard and I sit in this Adirondack chair and Dan walks out and we make eye contact and we just, like, nod.
So we bid. And they came back a little higher. And we said Mmhmm okay. And then and then and then we have a house. We moved in September 21st, 2022.
Dan does not live here. We just rely on him to be rational and see things we don’t. It’s good to have a friend like that. I fall in love with everything. T is a ball of cynical anxiety. Dan is level-headed.
So I fucking love our house. Original 1958 oak floors. Not pristine, but solid shape. Central heating, no AC but we can dream. It’s in great shape for its age, good foundation, new roof, new huge deck. It’s charming as hell. We love our neighborhood. Quiet. Great Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. Friendly people. It’s just… nice. We’re still learning how to be homeowners. But it’s great.
But there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that can compensate for the TBI. $10k wasn’t enough. $10mil wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough. Nothing.
We’ve been in the house for 14 months. We wouldn’t have the house without the catastrophic head bonk. And I think I was so obsessed with finding a house because I thought it would make up for the head bonk. And it doesn’t. It couldn’t. It was stupid to think that it could. It’s a great house. But nothing could.
I am mostly “back.”
I am doing way better than I was a year ago. I am doing immeasurably better than I was two years ago.
But I will never be like I was before I was injured. Looking at me you might not know that. But I know it. Every day I know it. I feel it. And it bloody kills me.
I spent the first, like, 29 years of my life in the pits of despair, man. Agony. I had good days and bad days. I had good years and bad years. And when I was 29 I had to move out of my rental house in Portland and I had nowhere to go so I went to my mom’s house in California because I was out of fucking options. And I got a job and I got a nice boyfriend and everything was temporary but it was sunny and it was tolerable and I was happy for just a little while, and I knew then that it was possible to be happy.
And everything went to shit again, and everything stayed shit for quite some time, but I knew it was possible to be happy so I fought like hell and I eventually got to a good place, a stable place, what felt like a really sustainable place, and by the time I was 39 I was married and I was on the right pills and I was employed and I was fucking healthy and everything was coming up Milhouse.
I guess I still believed in the American dream, that with enough sweat, luck, and bootstrappin’, you can do anything, you can be happy. You can succeed. I believed that I was away from the yawning chasm I’d camped next to for most of my life and I’d never get that close to it again. Suicidal? Not me! Not anymore, not ever again.
I thought I’d fought hard, and I’d won. I thought I could stop fighting.
And then I went to the fucking oral surgeon.