Hey everyone!
So most of you know that things are going really well for me after my TBI and back injuries…But…
Rehabilitation sucks.
Physically, I’m beyond frustrated. I am a high-performance athlete - not only do I ride and train three-day event horses (something very physically demanding in of itself), but I also run competitively and dabble in triathlons. In peak shape, I ride 12-15 times and run about 50 miles per week, in addition to barn chores, walking around campus, and everything else that I do. Over the past year, I was still riding as much as I normally do, but had backed off on running quite a bit due to time constraints with school, and over the summer I stopped running altogether. Then the fall happened and I lost EVERYTHING. Coming back from any injury is hard, but I had already lost significant muscle mass beforehand, and then the brain injury. Brain injuries are different - it doesn’t matter how amazing your cardio base is, you lose it. Muscle tone and strength - gone. Coordination, endurance, balance - all gone. And that all happens just in an instant. Then spend 2+ months on complete physical restriction, and it’s a mess. And that’s just the brain injury…No one has actually been able to tell me what’s wrong with my spine or why it causes me so much grief, but it frequently gets in the way of my rehab. And the more active I get, the more I notice physical deficits from the head injury - running, biking, and stretching showed more significant, yet subtle balance and coordination problems, and once I got back in the pool and started weight training again I realized how weak and uncoordinated my right side is compared to my left, especially considering that I am right-hand dominant. So I’ve been relying on my left side more and am now running into overuse injuries in the elbow and shoulder (awesome for swimming, right?) and because my spine and pelvis are so out of alignment, they’ve aggravated an old knee injury and are stressing other foot and leg structures. Riding (only on the flat and tiny crossrails right now) jack up my pelvis, spine, and shoulders and shows how I have absolutely NO core strength…Don’t get me wrong - I’ve made a remarkable recovery thus far. I mean, I ran my first road race yesterday morning - 5.2 miles on solid hills in 49:44. I can tolerate an hour-long lesson and in a lot of ways I feel back to my old self, but in so many ways I’m not. Most of the time I feel like I’m 80 years old. It hurts to bend down, to twist, to squat, to do pretty much anything. I just want to be fit like I was, but the rehab process is so slow after the head injury anyway, and now these other minor injuries are just adding to the frustrations.
Mentally I’m also doing very well, but now I’m at the point where a lot of the deficits I still have are going to be permanent, or at least a long time in coming back. This is more frustrating than the physical issues. To put things quite simply, before the injury I was a genius. IQ around 150, the ability to do anything I wanted, whenever and wherever and however I wanted, by myself. Now I’m a student in the Disability Access Services and I have trouble doing simple, mundane things. Yet to anyone who doesn’t know me or know about my injury, the disabilities are not immediately apparent. Again, the severity of my injury considered, I’m doing remarkably well in this area of rehab as well and my speech-language pathologist is quite pleased with my progress. But now, things are coming back so slow that it’s just infuriating.
But I think the most frustrating, infuriating, maddening, and discouraging thing to deal with is the attitude of other people. I have a few close friends who understand the severity of my physical and mental disabilities and how they affect my life and what it means to me, but most people do not, including my family. My parents were amazing during the first few weeks and got me to see the specialists I needed, and I specifically asked those who were “in the know” to not discuss things with others, but now…I wish people did know. I wish they knew how hard it is for me to make it through each day. I wish they knew that I’m not who I used to be. It’s like they expect me to be 100% because they can’t see anything that’s wrong, and therefore I must be that same superhuman girl I was on September 10. But that’s the farthest thing from the truth. They expect me to do everything I once did and act surprised when I say no or when I talk about anything relating to my fall or disability. They think it’s just this scary episode that happened a few months back and everything is over now.
But on the other hand, I never told them about it for a reason - I don’t want to be treated like a cripple or like someone who is severely mentally disabled. So few people know what a traumatic brain injury really is and what it means, so they fall back to stereotypes and they can be really, really hurtful. But so can the issues I’m dealing with now.
I guess I’m just hitting one of those low spots. I try to be positive all of the time because I believe that positivism and optimism and a true sense of happiness and meaning in life are more powerful and healing than any other medicine, but it’s hard to be 100% positive 100% of the time through 100% of circumstances. There’s been some really hard things lately, and I just don’t know how much longer I can keep pretending that things are so amazing when on so many levels I feel like they’re still falling apart. It’s like my life is this big mirror and in the accident it was broken into a million pieces. I’ve been putting everything back together very well, but now there’s this piece that’s missing, but I don’t what that piece is. I don’t know if it’s one piece or a thousand pieces. I don’t know what it looks like or where it is. I don’t even know if I can find it again.
I dunno guys. Like I said, things are going so well for me, but there’s just something inside me saying life isn’t complete. And I don’t know why.
