Since I’m the new kid on the block I might as well start with an introduction and what I hope to accomplish with this blog.
My name is Wayne McDonald and I am a brain injury survivor.
There are lots of conditions other than trauma that can injure the brain. My own injury occurred as a complication of surgery to improve the flow of blood from my aorta into my legs. During that surgery my blood pressure fell to a level that was not sufficient to support my brain’s voracious demand for oxygen and, as a consequence, I went on a five-week expedition to Never-Never Land. I’ve recovered almost completely but, as anyone who has made it back from wherever your brain goes during something like this will tell you, things are never the same.
The brain injury recovery process is a pretty strange animal to describe. You know that you’re a different person, but you can’t explain why you’re different. Maybe it’s something that you did almost without effort before the changes set in, such as doing simple math in your head. Or maybe now you have to use a cane, a walker, or even a chair. The changes are there when you wake up. After a period of time you realize that you’re stuck with the changes and that all you can do about them is make up your mind to get back as much of your “old” self as you can while learning to deal with the limitations imposed on your “new” self.
There’s a nice, clean, clinical term for that process: rehabilitation. The medical profession uses that term because it’s hard to get the insurance companies to pay for sadistic torture and all the pain that your body can handle. But over time you begin to respond to whatever additional damage is being done to your body and, once your tormentors notice that you aren’t fighting back like a wet bobcat, they find someone else to harass while you slip out the nearest unguarded door.
I won’t attempt to describe what goes on inside your head from the time you eventually wake up. Sometimes you dream that you’re back to the way you were before your world crashed around you like downtown Los Angeles during an earthquake. Personally, such dreams are what I find to be the cruelest tricks of the mind. Trust me, there are times that I wake up from such dreams and so desperately want to go back to sleep. But that, like complaining, doesn’t accomplish anything.
So I, and a few thousand other survivors, get up and face whatever reality awaits us in the new day. We don’t like it but we deal with it anyway. That’s what it means to be a survivor.
In the future I plan to use this blog to relate personal anecdotes, news from the medical sector, and even the stories of other survivors and their loved ones. Because, when you stop to think about it, the families of those with brain injury are survivors too.
