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The Home Stretch

aforrest Leave a comment

I had the intuition that I should title my blog post “The Home Stretch” while I was meditating.

Because my brain is still a little more groggy from all that I have been through the last 2 and 1/2 months, I had to think a little more about what the term sporting event the “Home Stretch” came from.  At first I thought it was a baseball analogy about the run from Third to Home Base.

As I reflected on it, I realized that I have heard it used that way by the announcer at baseball games.  And then I realized that the idiom comes from a horse race.  In fact, when I looked it up in Merriam Webster, I found that the first definition is “the part of a racecourse between the last turn and the winning post” and the second definition is “the final stage”.

This week, upon much reflection, I realize that I have turned the corner on the last turn and I am in the home stretch of getting back to my baseline before my dental appointment.

As I thought about what goes on in a horse race between the last turn and the winning post, I realized that there is a lot of strategy that goes on in that final distance.  I have seen many races (on television) where the horse that wins the race is not the horse that is ahead at the turn, although sometimes the horse that is ahead at the turn wins.  In a horse race, it is speed that wins, but it is also strategy.

What reflecting on what happens in a horse race means to me now is that I have to be careful and conscious about my home stretch.   And I have to use all my strategies to get from where I am now (roughly 80% of my previous baseline) to where I want to go (back to the 100%) in order to get to the finish line (where I want to go).  And in my case, I don’t want to leave all my energy on the field, like the horses and riders do.  I want to be able to keep going and building after I get to back to where I was before all this happened. In my case, its not how fast I cover this distance to 100%!  Its about doing the things that will get me there and which I can maintain after I get there.

In addition, I want to get back to 100% of where I was, and possibly a bit better than 100%.  (I talk about better than 100% of my baseline in my blog post called Focusing and Refocusing). And, I want to be able to keep going once I get back to where my old “new normal” was.   I want to keep my new new normal evolving, in other words the benefits of neuroplasticity.

Now, what I have learned from my experience about setbacks is that, if I try to get down the home stretch as fast as possible, I may never get back to 100% (of my baseline)!  

And I won’t be able to sustain that 100% once I get there.  

And, I won’t get to more than 100% which would be the best outcome and what I am hoping for.

When I say I have learned that going as fast as I can on the homestretch does not work from experience, I mean that the temptation is to try to race there as fast as I can! I am tired of having to compensate around my brain not working as well as it did.  I am tired of telling others that my brain is still not working well as well as it did.  My husband can see it, and my close friends who listen carefully can either see it or hear it.   But lets face it, most others who don’t know brain injury cannot.   And even if they could, I am tired of having to work further around my work arounds!  I am tired of taking cognitive rest.   I am tired of telling people I haven’t been able to do much this summer and thus have not gotten to all the things that I thought I would get to this summer including things I may have told them I would get done for them.  I am just plain tired of all this. And as an over achiever prior to my brain injury, I learned to push hard in the home stretch.  I learned it so well it became habit.

You see, I have learned over and over that my habit of pushing hard before my brain injury does not work.   So pushing harder in the home stretch, which was my pre-injury habit, also won’t work.

I have seen many others, not just myself, push hard to get through a concussion.  It doesn’t work. I have to consciously unlearn all my habits of wanting to be done with this last stretch.

So what is my strategy for this particular home stretch going to be?

The first step to changing this strategy is to identify the habitual problem of wanting to race through it.

I have done that.

The second step is to figure out how to be conscious about it.

I have begun to become more conscious about it by writing about it.  

That is one thing I love about writing my blog. Writing forces me to reflect and think about what is going on for me and how I am handling it this time.  

And that reflection sometimes leads me to different answers than I had when I started writing.

And in reflecting and writing, I have become more conscious that I have been at this (or a similar) juncture before, many times in fact in my recovery.

As I write, I am beginning to remember that I have even discussed this very issue before.   I now remember a conversation that I had with Dr Lebedun, years ago.   Dr Lebedun is a very bright and intuitive Neuropyschologist that I found when I lived in Northern Virginia.   I now recall that “holding back my inner over achiever” should be a part of my strategy now.

But its not all of my strategy.

I need to be conscious about figuring out my strategy and using what I have learned prreviously.

I need to make a “plan for success” about how I will approach it.  By the way, I attribute the concept of making a “plan for success” for some work I have been reading by Dr Larry Schutz. (More on his work later but here are the resources http://givebackorlando.com/hepusef/hepindex.html)

How do you approach the home stretch — whether it be back to your baseline before a concussion or back to a “new normal” baseline with persistent symptoms following a concussion.

Have you approached a home stretch in a way that you wouldn’t try again?

What happened?

What are your best strategies for the homestretch?

What has happened for you when you used them?

Who taught you or how did you learn your best strategies for the homestretch?

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Useful information

aforrest Leave a comment

This week has been a little like last week.

I am still struggling with not being 100 % back to where I was before my dental appointment that caused my setback 9 weeks or so ago.

I am doing what I can to keep my mood up.  Keeping my mood up helps me tolerate dealing with the symptoms of sleep issues and my head working more poorly than I have been used to.  Keeping my mood up does not solve the problem, but it does keep me more level headed and the more level headed I am about my brain working more poorly, the more I can take what my brain is doing (or not doing) in stride.  The more I can laugh at some of my foibles and the more I can help others understand that what they are seeing is indeed what I am experiencing.  Or deal with it when they cannot see that anything is different for me because they either don’t know what to look for or don’t know me well enough.

My husband was telling me this week that he is having a tough time understanding me.  I have come to appreciate that he can see the decline in my functioning quite acutely and to listen to him (rather than get defensive) for clues as to how he sees it.   When I listen to how he sees it without being defensive, we can work with each other to help both of us.  When I cannot listen to him about it, my poorer functioning can separate us.  I can feel like he doesn’t understand how hard it is for me or how much I am doing to try to make it better.   One his side, when we get separated around my brain injury related issues, he says that he feels that I am not appreciating how hard it is for him.   Its funny because we have had to learn how to not let our adorable son separate us on issues.  You would think that would help us, but it is much harder to not let my injury separate us.

My husband told me that it’s as if my sentences are thoughts in process rather than sentences.  After I thought about what he told me carefully, I realized he was telling me his side of exactly what I feel.  He was saying it in his words.  What I realized from talking with his is that my slower processing right now is showing up in my conversation.  I cannot process what’s happening around me fast enough.  Which means that I cannot pull it together to communicate efficiently or effectively to others around me, even though I know I am not doing well and I want to be able to communicate that.  Of course, this is a recipe for frustration above and beyond the frustration that I am already feeling because my brain isn’t working how I am used to it working.

It is useful to know his point of view.  I am not sure I can do that much to help it, but its good to understand what he’s seeing.

It is useful to know from him that often my paragraphs are not started with a topic sentence but are just a collection of sentences in which I hope that I will learn the topic sentence by getting my thoughts out in front of others.   This is occurring more often after the setback started.  And it does help to know that my husband is experiencing it because it reminds me to try to remember to start with a topic sentence when possible when conversing with others.  It also tells me that if people are not understanding me the first time I try to tell them something, that I should start with a topic sentence the second time I try to explain my thoughts to them to get get my point across.

Here are some of the things I did this week to move my setback recovery forward.

I made an appointment with my neurologist, Dr Hill.  Since I have plateaued in terms of getting back to my 100%, I figure he may have some suggestions.  Its been over a month since I have seen him last and I need to get his input on next steps.

I also made an appointment with Russ Adams, a mental health professional, who knows brain injury.  I had gone to see Russ Adams over ten years ago when I originally did rehabilitation here in Austin.  He already knows me because we worked together before.   He worked at St Davids Rehabilitation Hospital when I saw him last and he is familiar with the difficulty that people with brain injury had in getting the resources they needed and the journey that they travel to get better.

I also got some useful information this week that was very helpful for lining up my next steps to try to get the resources I needed to try to get me better.   Over the past couple of weeks, I had reached out to Dr Andrea Laborde and told her a little about what is going on in my life.   Dr Laborde is currently working at a concussion clinic in Australia where they take concussion recovery for civilians very seriously.   I was introduced to Dr Laborde by Ann Marie McLaughlin (and other folks) from ReMed, a forwarding-thinking Rehabilitation Company located in the Philadelphia area.  Dr LaBorde and I did a talk on mild TBI issues in about 2005.   More on this later.   Dr Laborde and I also worked on the Ontaria Neurotrauma Foundation guidelines on persistent symptoms following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury www.onf.org.   I have written about this work in previous posts.  I wanted to get Dr Laborde’s perspective on my setback.

Dr Laborde said brain injuries cannot get worse, but it is well known that the symptoms can reemerge after an external event after they have been managed.  Andrea told me that the medical term for the problem that I am having (which I have been calling a setback) is recrudescence.  She told me that at her clinic they treat a recrudescence by treating the symptoms.  In my case, that would mean treating the sleep issues, cognitive deficits, vestibular and/or vision issues.   The truth is that I have begun to treat some of my symptoms by adopting some stricter strategies on cognitive rest with the computer and with my mental effort. From her email, I realized that being as comprehensive about adopting stricter strategies, with the help of professionals may behoove me.  I will talk with my neurologist about this when I see him this week.

The other thing that happened somewhat serendipitously this week was that my former vision therapy doctor, Dr Amiel Franke, called me on Monday to ask a favor.   He is retired and is 90, but he still is very interested in what is happening with his former patients and I had had lunch with him last year if DC.  He asked me how I was doing, and I did not hesitate to tell him about my setback.   His response was, “I know exactly what is wrong with you”.   Now you might think that its hubris that he could diagnose me over the phone, and after telling me what he thought, he did advise me to reach out to my vision therapist here in Austin, Dr Denise Smith, to follow up.   The thing about Dr Franke that I know is that he’s always right.  At least he has always been right in the past, which means I know his batting average is 100% with me so far.

I made an appointment with Dr Smith and I will talk with Dr Hill, my neurologist, about the vision aspect also since he is a neurologist that believes that considering what is going on with the visual system is important in brain injury recovery.

On to next week…

Have you had a reemergence of symptoms after an external event?

What happened?

How was it treated?

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Re-focusing and binocular vision

aforrest 1 Comment

I see it as my job to get better and I am still working (hard) to get back to my baseline before my dental appointment on June 2.   Its been two months now.   Its been quite a struggle.  I have had to use all my resources and have had to find new resources to help me.   But I am getting there.  I think I am at 80% now, which means that in the past three or four weeks, I have made about a 10% improvement.

I would like for my improvement to go faster.   But realistically, I am grateful for that improvement.

My cold/bronchitis is lingering but almost over.

And I have been noticing that my vision and brain are reorganizing this week.   A visual/brain reorganization is about the best thing that could come of this setback.   Yes, I have felt my vision reorganize, and my brain reorganize.   The reason why I say that that is the best thing that could come out of this setback is because when I experience a re-organization, I know that I will get to a more functioning place with my brain once I get back to where my baseline was.

In other words, I will likely be better than I was before this setback.

Getting to a better place does not mean the setback was “worth” it.  It has been a struggle, to put it lightly.  It has taken all I have to give.   And its not over.

What getting to a better place means is that I have made the most of this period of setback.  In statistics, given that I am having a setback, I have ultimately used it to move forward.

Here are the highlights of what I have done this week to help myself:

I reconnected with my former speech and language therapist, Liz Joiner,  who gave me suggestions including some new resources for visual therapy and how my neurologist, Dr Hill, could help me get to visual therapy resources. Since visual therapy has helped me a lot, and since I am going through a visual reorganization, getting professional help with the next step, is definitely something I should consider.  Of course, they would have to do an evaluation to help the professionals decide if they can help me.

Liz also gave me some suggestions for a therapist who understands brain injury to give me some emotional support through this difficult time and who might be able to give me guidance and connect me with other resources here in Austin.

With the help of talking with others, I realized that the antibiotic I was taking for my bronchitis was wiping me out. So I started taking more probiotics.   That really seemed to help my gut — I could feel the difference.  What I have learned is that there are a lot of receptors in one’s gut.  And I have learned that helping my gut can help reduce some of the confusion in my head that I feel when I am sick and taking antibiotics.

How did I know I have begun having a visual reorganization?  My eye doctor in Washington DC, Dr Franke taught me how to recognize them.  One way that I recognize a reorganization is when I all of a sudden can see depth in a way I could not see it previously.  Its like flowers all of a sudden “pop out” with depth, that I didn’t previously see.

After my brain injury, I had depth perception issues.   What I know now is that I also had less than full monocular vision prior to my injury.  One of the benefits of doing vision therapy after my brain injury is that I have started to get back increased binocular vision and that the increased binocular vision that I am getting will make my vision system better than it was before my injury.

I want to be talking more (in my blog) about the benefits I have gotten from vision therapy in my recovery from brain injury.   For now, I want to say that Dr Susan Barry talks about her experience of getting binocular vision in her book “Fixing my Gaze”.   Dr Barry is a neurobiologist.  She understands the brain and brain development.  She describes getting binocular vision as a journey into seeing in three dimensions, in her book.   Actually, Dr Oliver Sacks first wrote about her journey in The New Yorker Magazine,  He called her “Stereo Sue”.   Dr Sacks was interested in writing about her story because getting binocular vision later in life is something doctors did not used to think that you could do.  And she did it as a result of finding vision therapy and optometrists who knew how to help her.

To finish this post, I also had the insight this week that I needed to let go of all the things I had planned to do in June and July that I have not been able to do so far.  I have been to sick to do them.

One of the things I did this week was start to re-focus on what I need to get done this month before my son’s school starts.   So my re-focus moved to a forward-looking strategy from a catch-up strategy.

And I also consciously worked on rebuilding this week.   I used Andrew Weil’s strategies of improving my surroundings to help lighten my mood and make me smile.  I bought flowers at the store and bought a sage plant with beautiful leaves to put by the sink to remind me of my new increased depth perception.   And I bought basil and made basil pesto which I love.  I started investing in the future, which is a good sign that of recovery for me. There is a point in recovery where I start feeling ready to invest in the future, and I have reached it.  I know that getting to the point of re-focusing and investment is a marker that my recovery is taking hold.

With my new vision for the future, its easier for me to get support for this last phase of my recovery back to or still hopefully surpassing my previous baseline.  Both from the inside and from others.

Yahoo!

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Being gentle with myself

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I am 70% back to my baseline before the setback that I had.

My Neurologist, Dr Thomas Hill, thinks that the symptoms and setback were caused from headaches causing sleep issues for me which in turn caused increased cognitive deficits.  Since I already compensate around cognitive deficits, I am trying to adjust as best I can to the, hopefully temporary, increased cognitive deficits.   What I have learned in my recovery is that sleep deprivation causes the same symptoms as brain injury.  So the good news about that is that solving the sleep issues will solve the temporarily increased cognitive deficits.   And, like Dr Hill said, because I have successfully resolved 70% of my symptoms, it is likely that I will be able to resolve the other 30% of my increased symptoms.   He is confident of that I will, so my job is to be hopeful and continue to do what I have been doing and believe in his confidence.

It has been 6 weeks though and realistically I know that recovery from these increased deficits will happen at their own pace.

I also know that this recovery may not happen in a linear fashion.   What that means is that each step may not get me better, it may be that each step will lead to getting better but not all steps will look like progress until I am actually fully back to my baseline.   That is important because I know that getting my head and my psyche on board with my continued recovery is essential.

In some ways, achieving this last 30% back to my previous baseline will be much harder than one would think.

Here are all the things that I am balancing.   I want to resume my life as it was.   Its been 6 weeks, so I have put a number of things that I had wanted to do, “on hold”.   And I want to get back to them, above all.  Doing the things that I enjoy and give my life meaning–being a mom, a wife and an advocate–are what keep me going in life.   So not being able to do them like I could before, as a result of my increased deficits, makes my life tougher.

Since my deficits are not as bad as they were 4 or 5 weeks ago, after the setback but before I was able to turn the corner on getting better, it is easy for me to think that they are all gone.  They are not, and I need to finish the recovery, else this period of not being completely back to my baseline will be prolonged.   And I know from experience that it is easy to think that I can “push past” this period.   I also know from experience, and from the wisdom of my health professionals, that ”pushing past” the deficits I still have, won’t shorten this period of increased deficits.

My real choice is to continue to heal or to prolong my increased deficits.

My real choice is to spend more time and energy focusing of recovery and hopefully recover quicker, or to spend less time and energy focusing on recovery and recover less quickly.

The uncertainty of whether I will recover the last 30%, is of course the thing that ultimately is bothersome.   I have to believe in my doctor and my experiences of recovery and I have to have faith.

I was thinking this weekend that given what I am going through now, thank goodness I have been through this recovery and rehabilitation before so that I can rely on the increased awareness and knowledge and compensatory strategies that I learned in rehabilitation.

As usual, when I sit down to write, I have way more to write about than what I have planned.

Since I am still observing increased cognitive rest (20 minutes on the computer at one time), I am going to post this and save the rest for the next post.

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Staying Afloat–Part 3

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Wow-I am still working hard to return to my baseline before my Dentist’s appointment.   Its going on 20 days now.

Wow, that has been a long time.

I don’t want to stay on the computer for more than 20 minutes, as I know the computer is not harder on my eyes and can wake me up and since I am having sleep issues still, I want to be firm on observing that.

So I am going to make this post short.

I am really thankful for all I have learned in rehab to help me manage this setback.

I am also really thankful for the doctors that I have who are helping me with it.

I have realized on my own this week that I need to be writing a sleep diary, so I am doing that.

Here the big points of what’s happening.

I got my headaches under control.

So it was lack of sleep (from waking up in the morning) that was the issue and subtle but increasing cognitive issues coming from not being able to get quality sleep.

I did a sleep study last week (that was luckily already scheduled) and will be able to see what issues can be understood from that once the study is interpreted.

I have made appointments to see my doctors here and in the meantime am trying some home remedies based on the Chinese medical notion of which organs are active at which time in the early morning.   More on that later.

On Tuesday, I was thoroughly bored, because I have had to disengage from my normal life so much.

I took boredom as a good sign.  I was out of pain.   I started trying to plan ahead.    A doctor reminded me that I needed to take my health issues first and to not jump the gun on getting back to the baseline.   Its a huge temptation in the face of uncertainty to want to plan as though everything will be fine soon, but can also be a trap.  I have learned that healing is not a straight line upward.

I started planning more engagement with people which was helpful.

I felt pretty frustrated on Wednesday as I wanted to get well faster.  Each day I was getting more sleep and waking up later, but still waking up in the morning.

Thursday, I woke up alittle down as my waking up moved from waking up later to waking up earlier.

I had to remind myself that I didn’t really know if that was better or worse.

The last two days I have appeared to feel more rested even though I am waking up still twice in the morning and at earlier times.

Like I said, I am really grateful that I can articulate what’s happening to me so much better than I did previously.

I have the vocabulary to talk about what’s happening and the ability to dig it out of my memory so that I can talk about it.  These are gifts of rehab and my public speaking.

And I have a lot more support of what I am going through because I can articulate it.  I have support from my husband and close friends and I have support from other moms, who get that not being able to function very well affects my ability to be a mother.

I know I need to be more concrete, but will do that when I feel better.    And I realized this week that this experience is useful for thinking about what its like for people with unidentified TBI who don’t have the support of doctors or health professionals or the vocabulary or the social supports that they need to get through a concussion that isn’t healing itself.

Its also a reminder that I know that I will come out of this, I just don’t know when.   I know that because of my experiences with my recovery.   I did not know that when I first had my concussion.   And I heard from many professionals that I would not get better of I wasn’t better in two years, so I had a sense of a deadline that I was not getting appropriate treatment to meet.   So I am glad to know that I will come out of this and that I just need to use my tools and my resources and communicate as best I can and take care of myself.   I don’t know when I will get better, so I need to manage that uncertainty, but I know that I will.

 

 

 

Read More - Staying Afloat–Part 3

Staying afloat — Part 2

aforrest Leave a comment

Last week I wrote about the difficulties that I have been having this past ten days with headaches, difficulty sleep and increased cognitive deficits.  I had gone to a health professional and these started happening after my appointment and when I tried to use the equipment that she/he made for me that was supposed to help me with a health problem.   Instead of helping me as I hoped, I am now working really hard to return to my baseline before my appointment with the health professional.

I loved the name of the strategy that was suggested– to “stay afloat”.   I had been using a strategy called “ride it through” that I had been taught in rehabilitation which I have used alot.   Stay afloat appealed to me because it acknowledged for me more validation of the difficulty I was facing.   The validation that it gave me was that I needed to be cautious of being sucked under.   What it made me see was that after a week of managing headaches and sleep issues and from not being able to be engaged in my life as was my normal, I was at a heightened risk of getting some situational depression.   Who wouldn’t get depressed when dealing with this, especially when I work so hard during my daily life to manage my life so that I don’t get headaches, and to manage life so that I get sufficient sleep and so that I don’t set off increased deficits.

Managing the increased health issues that I am having has reminded me that before getting all of the rehabilitation that I have now had, I did not know how to help myself around the symptoms (called sequalae) from my mild traumatic brain injury and that I have gone through much worse times than now.

So I wanted to point out the difference between trying to manage my life without the help of rehabilitation professionals versus now because as bad as what I am going through now, it was much worse dealing with all this when I not only had the sypmtoms but also had to find the doctors who could help me, and help them understand why I needed help at a time when I ha undiagnosed aphasia as well as other issues that compromised my abilities to get help.   Since I got some help, but did not get to appropriate resources for cognitive therapy and occupational therapy in the rehabilitation hospitals long after my concussion, I know the value of rehabilitation because I know what my life was like with out it.

I want to make two observations about my last post.   One, I purposely did not name the health professional I was working with since in truth during my recovery, I have had some similiar expericenes with all kinds of health professionals both those who purported to understand brain injury and health professionals who I needed to see who had not specifically studied brain injury.    Although I chose at that time to use the word health professional, I have decided it is useful to be more concrete in writing this blog post.   The health professional that I was working with was a dentist and so someone that I need to interact with at least twice yearly for checkups.    I selected my dentist carefully when I move to Austin (as I do all my doctors) and this dentist was not the first dentist that I visited which tells you something about the care I put into finding the right health professional.   I do hope that in using this example from my life, that my readers will understand that this experience often applies to health professionals, and is not specific to interacting with the dentist when one has persistent symptoms after brain injury.

The other thing I want to point out is a decision that I made in writing my blog midway through the post.   When I started writing my last post, I worked hard to edit it re-reading a paragraph after I wrote it.  So as I see it, the first part of the blog shows my editing of it.    While I was writing, I realized that my deficits were sufficiently increased (compared to my baseline before the dentist appointment)  by headaches my lack to sleep and that I was making mistakes such as omitting words, writing homonyms, spelling, and sentence structure issues, some of which I could see and others that don’t usually make and was not aware that I was making.

I made the conscious choice not to edit my words.

I will tell you why I made that decision.

Because 4 or 5 years in to my rehabiliation, I learned something about my brain injury that was eye opening to me. At the time,  I was working with the speech therapist who turned my life around, Liz Joiner.   I don’t recall just quite how this came about, but Liz saw something that I had written before I had time to go back and edit it.   Because I had done a lot of writing before my injury, it was my habit to edit my work.  Although I had a brain injury and was in rehabilitation for my brain injury, I still had my habits.   Until Liz recognized it and pointed it out to me, I was not aware that this habit of editing stood in the way of others seeing how my deficits were showing up in my writing.

So I wanted my readers to see the unedited version and the difference between my editing and my non-editing at a time where my deficits are increased.   “Show it, don’t say it” is the expression that a writer friend of mine has said over and over.

Since I am still recovering (although I have turned the corner from the risk of depression once I realized what was happening), I am going to stop writing for today.  I have already spent more time than I thought prudent before I started.

I went to review this on Sunday, and decided that I would post it as I wrote this yesterday and not edit it.

I am supposed to be resting so that I can get back to my baseline before all this happened.    Its a struggle not to (edit it), but I need to put my health first.

 

 

 

 

Read More - Staying afloat — Part 2

Compensatory strategies and Deadlines

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One of the great things about writing my blog is that it is forcing me to identify what stands in the way of writing my blog posts.   I have learned in Rehabilitation that the first step to resolving a problem is to be able to identify the problem is that is challenging for me.  Then I can work to come up with compensatory strategies to resolve the issue (work around it) or I can ask others for help to figure out a compensatory strategy to help me get around the problem.

I want to point out that last week, I had to come up with a compensatory strategy sort of at the last moment and I did!   Looking back, I am pleased with myself about that.  I so wanted to finish the post I had planned and get it out. Instead I came up with a strategy when things did not work out as I planned.   I realized I just had to explain what I had tried to do and wish everyone a Happy Memorial Day and be satisfied with that.

Last week was a short week for us because we were leaving early for the Memorial Day Weekend and we were traveling (which, in short, means a lot of extra preparation and cognitive steps for me.)   I had looked ahead and made plans to get my blog post done early so that I could post it.   I had started writing my on Tuesday, as far as I recall anyway.   And I had scheduled time into my calendar on the Wednesday in order to finish my draft before we left on Thursday morning.  All was going well so far.

To explain this further, I am going to step back a moment and say that what I have learned in rehab is that planning and figuring out how to meet a deadline are all “executive-functioning” skills.   I have had to relearn executive functioning skills as part of my speech and language therapy and I was lucky to have some very good therapists who have helped me.   And before I could even begin working on executive functioning, I had to do a lot of work on attention and concentration with my speech and language therapists.   What I did not know before my rehabilitation was that attention and concentration  are important skills underlying executive functioning skills.   My vision therapy has also helped me with these skills.  While I still cannot describe how, I know that they have.

My executive functioning skills are much better then they were because of my rehabilitation.   Some of these skills are more automatic now.   When I say they are more automatic, it means I do not have to think about them and line them up consciously, they happen by themselves (again).   Like when I used to get in my car and drive before my accident, I didn’t have to think about the steps of driving my car.   I did not have to think first I put the keys in the ignition, then I put the car into gear, then I adjust the mirror, then I back out of the driveway.  I just did all of those without thinking.  That is what I mean when I say that they were “automatic” before my accident.

Suffice it to say that how my brain worked was not automatic after my accident.    I had to relearn many steps that most adults do without thinking.

Back to my last Wednesday and trying to meet my deadline of posting my blog with the skills I currently have.

It used to be that when I was not quite done with a deadline, my brain could figure out how to resolve a problem in a limited time and resolve it without me having to consciously think about it.   I still remember the brain that could do that.   Because of rehabilitation and a lot of practice since rehabilitation, I have to consciously remember that as much as I would like to be the person that could automatically resolve deadline issues, I am not that person anymore.   That means that I have to find a way to resolve the deadline issue that incorporates my current abilities around deadlines.

So I was pleased with myself last Wednesday when I realized that I needed to just wish everyone Happy Memorial Day! as a solution to not quite having the executive functioning skills I needed to finish my post and get the other things I needed to get done that day.

What compensatory strategies do you use with deadlines?

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Happy Memorial Day!

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I wrote a draft post this morning to follow after the post I wrote last week on finding the best care after Mild TBI.

When I looked back at the draft, I felt uncomfortable with it.

After I thought about it awhile, I realize I just wasn’t sure how to finish it.  It needs to sit with me a little longer.

We are traveling to be with friends for the Memorial Day weekend.

I need to follow my compensatory strategies for packing.

I need to concentrate on doing all that I need to do to make travel as easy as possible for my family.

Happy Memorial Day!

 

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What Mother’s Day 2014 Means to Me

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This week, I attended the Kindergarten Roundup with my 5 year old son.   Kindergarten Roundup is a way for 5 year old’s to visit their future kindergarten school and begin to get ready for next year.

At my son’s new school here in Austin, Kindergarten Roundup includes a Dinosaur play performed by the current kindergartners for the incoming kindergartners.

My son picked a seat in the front row.  He invited neighborhood 5 year old friend and her mom to sit with us.

During the play, my son spotted three of his other neighborhood friends who were in the play and pointed them out to me with huge excitement.

My son loves Dinosaurs and to watch his friends sing about what they have learned about dinosaurs sent my son, and me, over the moon.

To prepare him for the event and to make kindergarten more welcoming for him, I had reminded him which friends would be in the play, so he knew whom to look for.

I was pleased that my son took the next step and spotted them and pointed them out to me, one at a time.   Other than telling him the names of his friends, I also told him the only other clue I had about whom to look for which was that one of his close friends was a “Rock Star” in the Dinosaur play.

He located all of his friends on stage and off stage by himself and told me each time he found one.

As my son and I sat on the front row watching the Dinosaur Play, I realized how special it was, and how amazing it was in my life to be sitting in this room at this time with him.    It flashed in front of me how many barriers I had to overcome to be this moment to be happening.

What were the barriers I overcame:

–I had to learn how to take care of myself again after my concussion.

–I had to find appropriate rehabilitation after my concussion with my cognitive issues standing squarely in the way of my ability to tell my doctors what was wrong and advocate for myself.

–I had to practice my own self-care over and over until I got it into my routine.  (This is called relearning executive functioning skills)

–Once I learned how to take care of myself as part of my rehabilitation, I had to practice and practice taking care of myself over and over again, until I could do it well.

–I had to practice taking care of other children so that I could take care of my own.

–I had to learn new cognitive strategies to make sure my child would be well taken care of and safe and to make sure I could be a good mother to him, to work around some lingering cognitive issues that I still had.

–My husband supported me through all of the practice I did, and got some practice himself!   Some practice was unintentional in that part of our adoption journey was practicing for two years during an adoption that ultimately was not successful.

–My husband and I navigated together two adoption processes.   The second one was successful.

I did all of that!   All of that had to happen for this moment to be happening.  Here I was sitting on the front row with my son watching the Kindergarten play with my neighbors!

And all the practice that I have had and all the knowledge of development that I have learned from the inside out with all my recovery, has helped me to be a much better mom than I would ever have been before my injury.   I have been able to give my son many gifts of understanding and compassion.   Rehabilitation and self-care have also given me the ability to break things down into smaller steps–baby steps– that are only understandable to me because of my insights from my recovery and the teachings that I have learned.

Pinch me!  How meaningful it is to have my family and celebrate how far we have come together this Sunday.

And thank you to all those who have supported this journey, including my many doctors and health professionals, my case management services at Brain Injury Services at Northern Virginia, my adoption support group in Virginia and the one we are building here, many other moms who have taught me lots of tips, my husband who I have mentioned before (but who I cannot mention often enough) and to my old friends and new ones.

I also want to thank Renee Trudeau who wrote a blog post about self care for moms and asked the question what self care meant to me.   I was introduced to her by a lovely friend and life coach in Virginia, Alison Horner Cardy. I met and got to know Alison before I moved to Austin because she was the nanny for my son’s friends at that time.

I love Renee Trudeau’s book The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal because it normalizes some of the difficulties that I face as a mom and provides suggestions.   I want to thank Renee Trudeau for the inspiration to write this blog post.    For me, it was thinking through the question she posed about what does self-care mean to me that I came up with this blog post on my walk.

In thinking through her question about self-care,  I thought about all the work I have had to do with self-care following my injury. With my injury, self-care is mandatory, not optional.  Without it, my functioning goes way down and my life becomes intolerable.  Self-care is mandatory for my life to work.

And ultimately, self-care has meant that I can take care of my son!!!  Hence the post that I wrote.

If you want to read more about my journey with my son:

http://www.brainline.org/content/2011/10/bringing-up-baby_pageall.html

 

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Listening to my body

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Perhaps one of the biggest gifts of recovery from brain injury is learning how to listen to the very subtle clues of my body and changing my actions in response to that information.

This week, the clues from my body were not subtle at all.    I have had a lot on my plate for awhile this spring.   At the same time, I have felt that I did not need to observe the same limitations that I have learned to observe in the past.

Its a tricky balance to figure out — how much to take on and how much to observe what I have already learned about my limitations.    Since I want to allow for improvements in my ability to function, I want to be flexible when I feel that I can take on more.    At the same time, I have to feel my way into how much my restrictions/limitations are changing  or how restrictive my new limitations are.   This is a trial and error process.

Earlier in my recovery, I call the trial by error process “error by trial”.    With a brain injury–with parts of ones brain not working well–its hard to learn to stop doing things that are making you feel worse, especially when I could do so much more before my injury that I had no sense for–and no experience about– the limitations that my brain injury imposed on me.

Earlier in my recovery, I needed a doctor or health professional who was knowledgeable about brain injury to help me with the trial and error process and to teach me awareness.    Because I did not get to appropriate health care early on in my injury, this meant I had to learn alot about my limitations on my own (which was very frustrating and marginally successful to say the least!).    I am especially grateful that my eye doctor, Dr Francke, helped me learn some of the basics on this by observing me twice a week at my eye class and by reviewing my activities with me on a weekly basis.

And the devil is in the details!   Figuring out the balance of how much rest and how much exercise for optimal recovery and when to increase rest and when to increase exercise is not easy.   For me, the help of a health professional was tremendous.   While my eye doctors have been very helpful for me with this, so too have been the speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physical therapists who eventually helped me with this as I was successful in getting more and more treatment.  Because they were observing me with regularity they could make seemingly suggestions or tweaks.  What I experienced  was that often small suggestions had large consequences towards improving my functioning.

As for this week, I had to stop everything that absolutely did not have to be done this week, until I felt better.   That meant resting horizontally as much as I could while my son was at school and getting increased sitters for the week.

It meant using all my compensatory strategies like:

–putting things that didn’t have to be done off,

–getting take out,

–limiting my driving,

–eating as healthy as I can;

–sitting down everywhere I went;

–getting a little exercise but not as much as I normally do;

–doing things that were inspiring or fun — like noticing the beauty of spring — that gave me some energy;

–and generally conserving my energy as much as possible.

I feel much better, but am still taking it easy to try to get back to my “normal”.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to write the blog this week.    I feel well enough to spend a little time on it but will spend less on it and come back to it if I need to next week when I hope to have more energy.

 

 

 

 

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