My recent head trauma has brought this topic up a bit more frequently in my life than ever before, and on a very personal level. My mom and I were talking a bit about this last night, actually; about how, since she and my sister were on the West coast (3hrs away), she didn’t know if I’d be alive by the time they got here. Recieving a phone call from a nurse, telling you that your son/brother was being helicoptered to a neurosurgeon & staff for an immediate operation to reduce chances of vegetation and death.
Everybody keeps on telling me how lucky I am to be where I am, and I can’t even remember the incident or the 3 days (hospitalized) following my fall+surgery…and then I was there in a hospital bed for another 3 days, watching tv and laying down, doing nothing.
…So for some reason (yes, it may seem strange), I don’t really know how to “feel” about the entire incident…Am I the same as I was before? I “feel” and “think” a bit differently about all sorts of things now (different being key). Most of my opinions/knowledge/things that I know have not “changed”, but the way that I think about them has. It’s difficult to explain exactly what I mean by this,.
Most of the people that I run into tell me about how they know (or know of) people who have been in similar (or worse) accidents and have lost much more than I have. One of the older guys (65+ish) that I know was telling me about a friend of his who, when they were in their 40’s or so, drove his motorcycle off the road and hit a tree, resulting in major head trauma. He was immobile (unconscious) until morning, when a little girl on her way to school saw him, and to tell her mother (a nurse). He cannot remember between the ages of 13 and [however old he was when he had his accident]. He didn’t remember his wife, his children, or anything after the age of 13(ish)!
My chiropractor told me today about a friend of his (also a chriopractor) who was in one of his final years of schooling, and almost at the point of starting his practice, when he was in a car accident and had fractured part(s) of his prietal bone and occipital bone, resulting in his loss of speech. He had to re-learn how to talk!
I basically just:
-Forgot three days.
-Hurt my back by messing with the curvature of my spine a bit between the lumbar and thoracic sections, and can’t quite move or do things the way I normally, painlessly would.
-Lost some hearing in my right ear.
-Have a sore right jaw bone.
-Have a long and not-so-nice-looking scar on my head now.
I guess it is sort of lucky.
But I can’t “feel” that luck.
I don’t really know how to feel.
It’s all strange not knowing if you’re the same person as you were 3 weeks ago, or how to react to all of this new information that you’re being pummeled with.
Oh, and ntappin is probably right about Facebook/MySpace being the only way any of you would find out if I’ve died. Hopefully Friday’s CT Scan shows everything as normal, because I don’t really want any more bad news.