When someone we love suffers a traumatic brain injury (TBI), a stroke, an aneurysm or some other life-changing condition to the brain—anoxia (the temporary absence of oxygen), for example—subtle (and some not-so-subtle) changes may occur in the survivor’s personality, sense of humor, and behavior.
Having suffered two epidural hematomas (blood clots on the brain), it was several years before I realized how my being had changed. When the head suddenly stops or starts, the brain—not being anchored to anything—moves around inside the skull, which has rather sharp protrusions sticking downward.
The effect of this “sloshing” is called coup and contrecoup. Just like if you take a water-balloon and roll it with a little force into a wall, it will absorb the force, and then it will recoil or roll back in the direction from which it came.
Now imagine what would happen to the balloon if rolled at 70 + mph toward that same wall. This is what happened to my brain when I had my car wreck in ’89.
Wikipedia reports that a coup, or the initial slamming of the brain into the side of the head impacted is referred to as a focal injury, whereas the contrecoup results in diffuse injuries—which occur all throughout the brain.
Contrecoup is the reason that when someone who, like me, hits the left side of his head on an immovable object like a car window or tree, sometimes he or she cannot move the life side of their body. (Normally the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice-versa.)
I was partially paralyzed on my left side for about 6 weeks, in addition to having all other aspects of my life thrown for a loop.
Although the paralysis was easy for the doctors and nurses to spot and focus their attention on, the changes to my character were far more noticeable (at least to me and those who knew me best before the wreck) down the road a bit.
For one thing, I lost most of my shyness and modesty. I like to think I’m getting it back, but it’s a daily struggle for me to understand what I should and shouldn’t say or do BEFORE I do or say it.
I remember grabbing one of my female physical therapists’ breasts as she tied my shoe one day after therapy. I just saw something and reached for it. (Now I do have better impulse control, as that was only a month or so after my head injury.)
After I recovered enough to speak, I thought everyone was interested in my story—whether at school, the grocery store, the doctor’s office, I thought complete strangers wanted to know what happened to me and how I came through it all.
I became the center of my world and, as a result, was very egocentric. And to be fair, most people were a little curious about what the giant scar on my head was from or why I spoke a little slower than most people. But that was it. They didn’t want me to tell them, in detail, my entire story about my accident or recovery.
As I aged, and healed, I began to realize that the majority of the world didn’t care what had happened to me, and that when they asked, “How you doing?” most of the time it was simply a greeting.
When returning to school in the fall of ’89, I realized that I was not going to be able to participate in athletics for the remainder of my high school career. Prior to my wreck, I had been active in sports and loved (almost) every minute of it. However, without having a one to two hour practice everyday after school began taking it’s toll on me and on my psyche.
It’s no secret that people who survive head injuries and the like are prone to developing chronic depression. As was the norm, I spent the remainder of my high school and most of my college years perpetually depressed.
Currently I’m taking medication daily to combat depression, and most of the time it works. I’ve never attempted suicide or masochism. But there are times when I get down or blue—that’s just part of life.
I’ve noticed that as I write this post, I am becoming more depressed than usual, which brings me to reveal my strategy for dealing with depression. Most of the time, I don’t think about being depressed or how I was before my accident. I feel I’m most in control when I don’t think about the root reason I get depressed. It’s not that I don’t think at all about what I used to be like, but I don’t perseverate on the way I used to be. Rather, I concentrate my energies on making the best of the hand I was dealt.
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