A Serious Wakeup Call

It is Friday, and I am already tired. Normally I would be winded or even slightly ready for a weekend.   Today was my first independent day ever.   During the course of the day I was given a list of things to do.   Each of the things was designed to keep me busy and to spur me onward by making sure I used good time management. The hard part was I had to stay organized and finish the list of tasks before I left at two o'clock. The hard part was I had to track down my therapists, and they had to sign off on my work. Which was difficult as some of them were not here today. First I had to plan my day out.  The list of activities were also timed meaning I had to take a lunch and had to do them at certain times of the day. Time management was definitely part of my schedule--and I had to be organized.  So I started earnestly.  I went from task ti task doing them in places where people could see me, specifically tasks where I needed to do 15 minutes ...

You can learn so much from the Golden Girls. There is a lot to learning about a brain injury.  From my time at the Center, I have learned much about my fellow patients in many new ways that help me know them more intimately. Every day that I go to the center I meet a patients who teach me something important about myself and brain injury. The person who taught me the most was Mike Greg.  Mike Greg who taught me patience and kindness.   Mike taught me a lot about stroke patients.  He taught me about filters and patients who lose the ability to filter the things they say.   There were many times I understood better but it was not until my mandatory four week vacation that I began to watch or rather binge the Golden Girls, and I noticed that Sophia, (played by Estelle Getty,) the oldest golden girl, mentioned in the pilot had a stroke.   It was only mentioned occasionally at first and only in the pilot. Now, I watched the series for many years, but...

A Brief Survival Guide is dedicated to the patients of CNS A Brief Survival Guide as dictated to me by the patients of CNS. During my time at CNS I learned a few of the many idiosyncratic terms of going here.  Many of these terms are both humorous and enlightening as one of the newbies to the Center.   What follows are the many terms I learned and the patients who taught them to me. The ARM -- The Auditory Rehab ilitation Module.  Many times the Arm is brought up to give a break to the many patients who a struggling to regain and struggling to renew their cognitive faculties on a daily basis here at the Center. Arm Bike --the bane of the OT gym and workroom. The dreaded bike which at first was difficult to use.  But after a while you get to know the bike intimately and your ability to pedal gets longer. The Perfect Excuse --The excuse we all have that we easily laugh at when times are hard.  We often refer to our brain injury or stroke any time we need to....

When truth finally sinks in. For many patients there comes that time when there is a element of denial. For some think they will only be here at best three weeks. One of my my brothers, Skip told me that he lived in denial for a long time.   Being at the center was a real wake up call.   Much like Skip I had to adjust to the concept I would be working on many things, most importantly I would have to understand that my life would change, but I would get better.   It would take longer that I expected. I used to think that I would only spend about four months at the center, and I would only be here "just over the summer." The first truth bomb hit me when I was Occupational Therapy.   What I had referred to as my 79 percent side had become painfully obvious whenever I tried to write, or type of use as part of my testing.  Each time I used my right hand I tended to use my left hand to compensate--and the problem was I was right handed,  ...

There are many things that happen on the road to recovery. It is one in the morning, and I have left my wife in our bed as I search the keys trying to make sense of this grief that has overwhelmed me. There are very few moments that I  have been so sad at losing a person--even now I find it hard to compose the words that I hope will come out of my soul and be a touching tribute to this man, my friend. Mike Greg was my friend.  Before he left the Center he planned to return to work.  His job said he could return to work, and I was ecstatic for him.   Val in occupational therapy had told him normally she would usually be the person that would okay his discharge--that because he had been okay to return to work--she normally would make sure he was ready--I apologize, I do not have the words to write this post. I was so happy for Mike.  He was highly functional, and he had an infectious smile and personality.  We all looked on him as a sort of big brother--...

On the second day of being at the clinic I was told to go into PT where I met several of the most abrasive and wonderful people around. After years of being very lax with my health--I say lax because I was not unfit, but the amount of fitness that I was capable of was unclear. I had had a brain injury and I had basically been unable to walk for a month--now I was beginning a long and arduous project of rebuilding those neural pathways and to be honest just rebuilding the will to walk again. So the first day of physical therapy I began each day with a PT therapist who started talking to me about what I had not done, really--work out. My therapists name was K--- and I began by doing bridges. They were not hard but by the end of the week I done so many bridges, and I was already stronger. While I was doing bridges (which to be honest were not very hard) I began to notice there were a lot of people who were improving and working on their own problems--and  every patient around me was d...