Your life, your brain, you're healing!
TBI anger is unlike any other kind of anger. It taps into our primal instinct to protect ourselves, like any wounded, cornered animal, with a burst of adrenaline. This is the source of the raw, primal strength, energy, focus, and coordination. Once it hits, it can not be stopped, only redirected in a safe direction.
Brain injury is weird. It is weird from the inside, and, from the outside, it looks weird and sometimes people mistake weird for “fake” or exagerated or psychological when it’s actually just plain head-scrach-worthy. While every brain injury is different and effects each person differently, there is a commonality (and folks with other brain challenges like stroke, brain cancer, disease, etc, experience much the same thing, though for different reasons): we all have to learn to stay within our daily brain budget. You may have received this link from someone, asking you to understand their brain injury. You may have stumbled on it yourself, or be the person with brain injury trying to understnad what is happening and why the “world just seems so hard.” If you want to understand the weirdness of brain injury in yourself or someone you love or care about, start by understanding the daily brain budget.
For those who want or need to understand what it is like (sort of) to be blind or deaf, that is relatively easy to accomplish. Block those senses. It doesn’t give an appreciation for what it is like to live without sight or sound day in and day out, but you get an excellent taste.
Brain injury raises a lot of questions. Some people aren’t comfortable asking questions. Other people are very comfortable knowing what they think they know have don’t see a need to ask questions (St. Michael defend us!).
There are many lists and guides out there the describe the symptoms of brain injury. There are not many that explore the weirdness of brain injury and what that does to family and friends or even bosses and co-workers. Educate yourself about the facts of brain injury, lest you be the equivalent of the person in 1853 not believing a blind man can use a stick to “see” and ignorantly proclaiming “They don’t need a stick, clearly they can see, even in the dark!”
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.” – Wesley (aka the Great Pirate Roberts) in the film “The Princess Bride”
Life with brain injury is often compared to a “long hard road.” It is. It’s got extreme ups and downs plus all kinds of rocks and other challenges. The question is, what do we do about it?
The road, after all, is the road. It’s ours to travel. How do we travel it with the greatest amount of joy and the least amount of pain? Attitude and faith.
Exercise really does help heal the brain. One of the now known ways it does is by helping generate new mitochondria in the brain and throughout the nervous system. When mitochondria, the powerhouse within each cell of the body, get low neurons risk dysfunction or death. Running the Colorado Trail, along with all other forms of exercise, help heal my brain. What exercise do you find helps heal yours?
Ketogenic simply means getting your primary energy by burning fat, as opposed to most people in the US today who get most of their energy by burning glucose. Science is showing us that when fat is our primary fuel we function much smoother and healthier — including multiple studies showing brain benefits of burning fat os our primary fuel. In essence we access God’s engineering by shifting to burning fat rather than glucose.
As of now, 2019, I am seventeen years into life aware I have brain injury. My eighth concussion in 2002 left with with cognitive deficits (memory, focus, attention, variable brain fatigue, sensory overstimulation, and more) and vertigo. My first concussion was 33 years ago. When I was ignorant I had brain injury, between the ages of 12 and 31, life had waves of times when it “just seemed harder” — especially in the weeks, months, and years after each concussion along the way. I unwittingly compensated — learned how to get around the deficits I didn’t know I had.
As with all of us and our caregivers, I am the expert on my brain injury and the doctors are my consultants. The doctors ran out of ideas years ago. I haven’t. And my ideas are working and helping, and they may help you also. They are not specific answers, but rather ideas that you and your caregiver together can examine and apply to your specific situation and symptoms and needs and learn together how to run forward more fully.
Our society does not deal with pain and loss very well, particularly pain that does not disappear after a week or two. So it should come as no surprise that we may not know how to deal with the pain we experience because of our loss of capacity. Close loved ones also need to grieve the loss, especially if their own lives have changed as a result.
Though there are a rare few doctors whom I respect, I now know why the medical profession not longer deserves respect or high esteem. In 1964, the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath was written. It eliminates many of the safeguards for the patient and adds in responsibilities that are God’s alone. Let’s take a look at the differences and explore some of the subsequent and yet to come ramifications.