Mental Strength - 3/12/20

This is what an invisible injury looks like…completely normal on the outside. My accident happened three years, and two days ago (or 1,097 days, if you want the more dramatic way of saying it.) Sure, I can talk about it casually. But I still can’t REALLY talk about it without crying.

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Mental Strength.

Two days ago was my three-year accident anniversary that lead me down this Post Concussion Syndrome path - that has turned into more of a journey. Or as I sometimes more affectionately refer to it as my trip to hell and (not quite) back (yet).

Honesty time. I DO NOT love my anniversary date. I’m sure everyone handles theirs differently, but for me, emotionally, it’s tough. However, this year, it didn’t start bothering me until about a month beforehand. Usually it’s six months beforehand…progress. For me, it’s not something that makes me sad all the time. It comes in waves. One minute I’ll be fine, the next minute I’ll be crying because a memory popped into my head. More times than not it’s memories from the accident itself, or who I was before the accident, or everything I lost, all the pain that I went through both physically, mentally and emotionally, the list goes on. A lot of processing takes place during my mourning period leading up to my anniversary. A lot of random tears. A lot of random crankiness. A lot of doubt. A lot of surreal moments of realizing this happened to me. That I had a brain injury and that I’m still trying to piece my healing puzzle back together…and it’s been three years. Sometimes I still can’t believe this happened and it shocks me all over again when I think about it.

Because I’m going through all of this with the anniversary coming up, this tends to come up in conversation, well, because it’s on my mind. And I tend to verbally spew whatever is on my mind. So as I was recently having one of these conversations, I asked the person I was chatting with what he actually thought of my injury. He didn’t know me pre-injury and I met him about six months after my accident. (Keep in mind this was a pretty vulnerable conversation and I 100% appreciated his honesty.) He said that he struggled understanding my injury and that in the beginning he sometimes wondered about my mental strength. For example, is this injury made up in her head. Is she just that mentally weak that she can’t push herself to improve and get better. He used the example of playing sports. If you get a sports injury, you work out the injured part and push through the pain, etc.

As you can imagine, his answer has been on my mind leading up to and even after my anniversary. Because it has honestly been one of my biggest fears – more so in the beginning, but it’s still there, to some degree, now. That people would question my injury. That people would not understand. That people would think I was crazy or weak. That people would question my sanity or think that I was faking my injury. My injury was invisible. And people’s opinion was based on whether or not they believed me.

Now, in my opinion, his wondering that is totally valid. There were even times that I questioned my sanity. If it was possible that I was subconsciously making all this up and that I wasn’t actually injured. That’s a weird place to be by the way, but that’s neither here nor there.

So let’s unpack this. Unfortunately, with an invisible injury, there is no measurement of mental strength. For the most part, everything the person experiences is hidden from plain sight. There is no cut with staples, cast from the tip of your toes to your hip or x-rays to help someone visualize the amount of pain you’re experiencing. It’s interesting that we need to SEE the injury to believe it. We need to see a limp, a scar, an x-ray of a bone completely broken into two parts.

Here’s a little lesson on brain injuries.

Our brains are the consistency of gelatin. It’s the most fragile organ in our body. It has thousands of cells, neurons, axons, nerves all communicating with each other and with every other part of our body, constantly sending and receiving information. Each part of the brain is responsible for a different function. Most times each part is functioning simultaneously with all the other parts. Talk about multitasking.

Your brain is sitting in a space surrounded by fluid. There is a web of fascia called the dura mater that is insanely tough that adds a protective layer to your brain. There are tight junctions in your blood vessels to act as a net, keeping anything toxic from entering your brain space because the chemical environment has to stay in balance for your brain to function properly and to remain healthy. I just named a few of the incredible functions our body has in place to keep our brain safe.

Some brain injuries are visible on MRI’s and CT scans because there’s bleeding or actual damage to the brain tissue. Other times, (and in my case), the injury is on a cellular level. So cells and pathways were damaged. That type of injury does not show up on MRI’s or CT scans. But there is other types of testing that can show the systems that were damaged.

When an injury happens to your head, that gelatin consistency brain can crash into your skull. It can bruise. It can bleed. The fascia, the blood vessels, the brain tissue, the cells, neurons and axons can all stretch, pull, twist. Pathways that once worked flawlessly can become like old roads, with potholes and bumps. The systems that once worked meticulously with each other suddenly are not communicating properly.

The brain isn’t interpreting what the eyes are seeing.

The vestibular system is no longer able to tell your brain where your body is in space.

You no longer have the proper blood flow to your brain and some people can’t do physical activity. (Huge bummer!)

The part that processes sound suddenly is amplifying everything and can no longer distinguish more than two sounds at the same time which makes everything you hear painful and your brain just can’t process it which means you can no longer be in any environment that exceeds what your brain can process.

The nerve that controls all your autonomic functions can be damaged. That translates to swallowing problems, heartrate problems (either too high or too low), digestion problems/leaky gut, etc.

Your nervous system, which is an essential part of the brain and is responsible for keeping us safe and out of harms’ way, can be damaged so your brain can no longer distinguish what is a threat and what is not. That means that you are constantly in a state of fight or flight and your brain doesn’t know how to shut that off. You are constantly amped up. This effects your sleep as you can’t calm down enough to fall/stay asleep. You are constantly running on adrenaline even though you are 1,000% exhausted.

After the injury and your cells and neurons have been twisted, pulled, and stretched there’s this little thing called axonal tearing or shearing. The axon is a cable that extends off a neuron and transmits electrical pulses to other neurons. This means that the axons that are connected to your neurons can either become damaged or can completely shear off. So your initial brain injury can continue to get worse for 48 hours after the initial impact, as your cells and neurons are slowly dying because of the tearing/shearing. Another fun little fact, after those cells and neurons die, they excrete all these awful toxics into your brain environment. As if dealing with the injury itself wasn’t bad enough.

I could go on and on, but seriously, if you aren’t lost already, you would be soon. But that’s some of what happens during a brain injury and what someone can experience from a brain injury.

The other day, a friend asked me to cover morning chores on a little ranch they own for a few days so she could go on an impromptu vacation. She ran me through what needed to be done, and I agreed. In a way, even me agreeing to this was a pretty big step for me. And I won’t lie, it felt pretty awesome doing something worthwhile in a barn again. (There was so many gains and wins in this experience…and I’m pretty excited about it.)

Okay, now here’s the other side that people don’t see because I hide it and have made it a point to fake being well (for the most part) even when stuff bothers me so I’m not the goofy girl with the “brain injury.” (Unless you’re someone I’m comfortable with…then I talk pretty openly about it if there’s something that’s bothering my brain.)

On day two of chores, I could feel the inflammation in my neck. Anytime I lifted anything a bit heavy I could feel an increase in my headache.

It was windy today. I had to stop what I was doing and go get my ear plugs from my car otherwise it would get unbearable and it would zap my energy. Also, the wind made me a little sensory overstimulated so I had to be careful how hard I stepped when I walked. This doesn’t happen very frequently anymore, but on days that my symptoms are amped up, if I step too hard, I can feel it jarring my brain and it hurts.

The girls that did chores the night before forgot to throw extra bales down so I wouldn’t have to lift them. So I had to go up to the loft, and while I COULD technically carry them over to the shoot, I opted to log roll them so I would minimize the amount of time I had to hold them and limit it to just when I had to heave them into the shoot…and even then I had to lift gently, make sure at any point my headache/pressure didn’t increase past a certain point. That I didn’t make any jolting or jarring movements. Everything had to be slow, calculated and measured. If not, I can get an instant headache and it can really mess me up, sometimes for a few days.

I had to carry five flakes of hay to one of the far pastures…the first day it aggravated my neck/head so I found a little cart to wheel it out. You learn little tricks and ways to make things easier for your brain…I’m always gauging how doing a particular thing will impact me over the next day or two.

Trying to keep tract of who gets fed what and where this bucket goes and who gets their blanket off…that really taxes your “thinking” brain. So I wrote everything down in my phone to save “brain power” and to make sure I didn’t forget anything.

I usually like to listen to music or something on YouTube but didn’t feel like it because my brain was tired and was having to concentrate and think a lot to make sure I was doing everything right. Sometimes my brain just needs silence.

I had to drop a round bale into one of the pastures. No problem. Except that the horses had moved the round bale feeder farther into the pasture. My friend told me before she left that if they did that, to just go push it back into place and it’s not a big deal…it’s super light. So I marched my little hinny in there under the impression it would be a quick, two second fix. Wrong. It was too heavy for me. (that’s what not being able to work out for three years will get ya.) I couldn’t put that much “oomph” into pushing it without making something from the neck up angry. Okay, I’ve got this. So I went and found a tow strap, got the side-by-side and was able to drag it into place.

Meanwhile, the dog almost got trampled by one of the horses…that was a spike in fight or flight mode…So I did some deep breathing and got things calmed back down…I mean, after I did a fair amount of yelling at the horse, the dog and anything that was within ear shot. Which, when my symptoms are spiked or I’m sensitive, yelling is actually quite hard on my brain/head…and I definitely felt that today. That’s what I get for yelling…Whoops.

By this time, I was reaching my limit with walking. Turns out, even on a “little ranch” everything seems to be forever away. Walk here, walk there, walk back over here. Carry this. Lift that. Oh, I forgot this thing over here. I can only walk a certain distance before it starts spiking my symptoms or wears me out.

I’ve never moved a round bale before…and this might sound silly, but I was concentrating really hard…which, by the way, takes a toll on your brain. Pretty much all the things I was worried about happening essentially did. I dropped it, it almost rolled down the hill (which would have then crashed through the fence), it wouldn’t stop rolling on the pokey thing and about unraveled, when I did get it picked back up and took it down to where I needed to drop it, I lifted it really high in the air to clear the fence…just as the wind started hurricane gust blowing (or so it felt like)…I swear half that round bale ended up in my eyes, hair, jacket, shirt nose, ears…there was a lot going on lol.

Being around 1,000 pound animals kinda has you on high alert just from a reinjury standpoint. You feel extra vulnerable and worried you wouldn’t be able to get out of the way fast enough. That has your spidey senses on, almost constantly, scanning for any dangers. One of the horses almost shoved me into a gate, which wouldn’t have been ideal. Turd. haha

My friend asked the evening chore girls to clean the stalls and do any of the other physically demanding stuff. That way I just had to do the bare minimum to get the horses fed and watered.

Keep in mind, prior to my accident, this is all stuff I would have done without hesitation or thought.

So there it is. This is an experience three years post-accident. I’m about 75% better than what I was. And aside from the evening chore girls knowing I didn’t clean the stalls, to anyone looking at me today, they wouldn’t have known anything was wrong with me or that any of that was going on “behind the scenes.” But I knew. I also know who I used to be. I know the things that I once could do and now can no longer do or have to do a variation of. I know the pain of losing my dream job and career because my brain no longer works right. I haven’t hiked a mountain in three years because I physically can’t and that makes me so sad. For months I had the nagging fear of what if I never get better? I experienced loss of identity. At one point I had to accept that I might never be able to get married or have children…and that broke my heart in a way that it has never been broken before. I’ve had to sell everything I had of value just to pay the never ending bills. It’s been a constant game of one step forward, three steps back. Some days I feel “good,” other days I feel awful. I had a terrible headache for two years straight. My eyes constantly hurt. My neck felt like it was constantly in a vice. My right ear hurt so bad ALL THE TIME. It was full and crackly nonstop. I had horrible head pressure. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t watch movies. I couldn’t do any physical activity. I couldn’t do any cognitive thinking, processing or concentration. Riding in a car made me ill. Sometimes a setback would take a month to recover from. The fatigue was AWFUL. I had to nap multiple times a day just to be able to survive. I’ve never been so sick of naps in my entire life, haha. The frustration through all of this is unexplainable. Words cannot accurately portray the kind of frustration, hopelessness and worthlessness that I felt.

I know the mental strength it took to get through this, but that’s only because I lived it. So, with nothing “visible” for the average person to measure it by or compare it to, it’s probably not something anyone will ever fully understand unless they go through it. And that’s okay. But my hope for all of us is that we become kinder, more loving, willing to show more grace and compassion to those around us. Each one of us is fighting a battle that no one else can see.

-L

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