It was just another ordinary summer evening in July 2018. My wife was watching television in our living room, and I was in the kitchen playing fetch with our dog, Ozzie. He brought me his favorite ball, I tossed it and watched as he scrambled to retrieve it and bring it back again. As he came running back, he dropped the ball, and it rolled under one of our bar stools under the right corner of our kitchen island. I squatted down to grab the ball before he could get to it, and in doing so, didn’t realize I was directly beneath the corner of the granite island countertop. I popped back up with the ball in my hand and caught the back of my head on the corner of that granite slab. I assume there was probably a sickening “THUD” or “SMACK” as my head made contact, but I honestly cannot remember. In fact, I can’t remember anything else from that night or the days/weeks that followed.
My wife heard the commotion and ran to find me blacked out in our kitchen floor. She said when I came to, I had an eerie “dazed” look on my face, and my eyes were unfocused. She lovingly describes it as, “the lights were on, but nobody was home.” She rushed me to the ER for evaluation. I was diagnosed with a TBI, and we were sent home with some light reading material and things to watch for. However, neither of us could truly comprehend what to expect over the course of the following months. Yes, months.
In the days and weeks that followed, my symptoms worsened. Apart from the common symptoms you think of when hearing about a concussion (headaches, dizziness, brain fog, etc.), I suffered from severe vertigo, vomiting, blurred vision (even while wearing glasses), migraine headaches, and the complete inability to speak. I couldn’t articulate or verbalize a single thought. I couldn’t say my own name.
I had weekly follow-up appointments with my primary care, weekly vision tests, and a neurological consult. I was told that I had sustained a pretty serious TBI, and the only way to get better was to treat my brain the same way one would treat a broken arm or leg – don’t use it. Literally. For weeks, I could do nothing more than lay in my bed with a blackout eye mask, in complete quiet and darkness. Anything that required thinking, I couldn’t do it. That meant no reading, no watching television, no scrolling on social media, no exercising, no swimming, and no activities that might cause additional injury to the brain. As you can imagine, this all took a toll on my mental wellbeing. I was depressed and very scared. I had just turned thirty-one a couple of months prior to my accident, and I had no way of knowing how long it would take my brain to recover – or if I would ever be able to speak again.
It has been almost seven years since my TBI. Over the course of time, I slowly regained the ability to speak. At first, I could only say a few words at a time, and I had a bad stuttering problem, which lasted months. To this day, I still stumble over my words, especially if I am overly tired. I also have to take medications for my ADHD, something that I had always been able to manage without meds, prior to the TBI. I also still suffer from migraines, irritability, and BPPV, which is benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. That’s a fancy term for when your inner ear crystals are out of alignment, resulting in sensitivity to movements, dizziness, nausea, queasiness, fatigue, and a general sense of imbalance brought on by tilting your head, sitting down, or standing up. Despite all of these things, I consider myself to be quite lucky. Statistically speaking, thousands of people like me suffer from traumatic brain injuries every day, and many of them never fully recover. For this reason, I feel very strongly about spreading TBI awareness. My own experience has helped me empathize with many clients who are struggling, or have struggled, with living with a TBI. It was a life-changing moment for me and my family, and I understand firsthand how scary, frustrating, challenging, and emotionally exhausting the road to recovery can be. Life has looked and felt a lot differently over the last seven years, but the experience has taught me to never take anything for granted.
