Discovering Dain Bramage
Traumatic Brain Injury is no laughing matter. (So sometimes all we can do is crack dark jokes.)
If you’re reading these tales in order as I post them, sorry for the repetition. I am trying to weave together the four different bouts of old blogging I did about this topic, all the journal entires, and the letters/emails I wrote during that time. Sequencing is one of the places where I’m Dain Bramaged. The newsflash at the end of this post actually belongs here, not where I put it the other day.
Onward!
BE WARNED: This one delves into some treacherous, dark waters. Before one can actually get to the stage of Acceptance, the reality of the situation must first boot out Denial and settle in for the long haul. Up until this point, the experience sucked, but I was still working under the assumption that everything would eventually heal up and go away.
I hadn’t known that this could be my new normal. Because “little” concussions heal. Right?
Then I met some people who showed me that isn’t always the case. That’s when Despair began to set in.
Thank goodness for one of those other stages of grief: Anger.
🎄 Holiday Hell - Day 8 🎄
December 28, 2000
28 years old
Movement off to the side of me. Dad just came in from the kitchen. I squish my neck brace against the couch as I lean back farther to look at him because I can’t turn my head. His mouth is moving. He’s saying something, but I can’t—
Can’t—
I blink.
I can’t hear him.
I haven’t gone deaf. The TV is still on. I can hear that just fine. More mouths moving. Background laughter from the sitcom crowd. Little ditty of music as the scene flips.
Dad tilts his head. He gets that look. I know that look. He’s repeating himself.
And I can’t hear him!
I try to tell him. I try to explain what's happening but I don't understand it myself. My mouth is hanging open. I can feel it. My throat contracts.
Nothing comes out.
All I can do is stare up at him like that day when I was four. I slipped off the drop-off and sank to the bottom of the pool but this time I can’t move my arms, can’t lift them toward him, and he has no way to reach into these waters and pull me back up from where I’m drowning.
He looks over his shoulder, growls something at the kitchen. Mom comes in. Those big eyes. I know that look, too. They’re both standing over me. Gawking at me. Confusion. Concern. Expectation.
I can’t meet it.
Can’t do anything but listen to that stupid sitcom and stare.
And the crowd all laughs.
Joyous of joys. I have now gone from constipation to diarrhea, and I have menstrual cramps so bad that I’m nauseous. Go figure. My pelvis is twisted.
The knife is still jammed in the base of my spine. It’s always there. No matter how I sit, how I lie down, how I move and stretch, it’s always gouging. Constantly wakes me up. When the spasms hit, they bolt me upright, which sends two red-hot spears up my spine and slams an anvil into my neck. Whiplash all over again. It cinches the invisible steel band tighter around my head. Compressing the top of my skull down onto my eyebrows like a too-tight helmet. Magneto’s Helmet, all made of pain. More spears jab through my eyeballs and there’s a vice clamped onto the hinges of my jaws.
I can’t sleep. I’m having nightmares. Swordfights…going to work and being so out of the loop that I don’t know how to do my job anymore so everyone is yelling at me... Or losing things—important things, and getting in trouble. So many dreams I can’t remember.
If it’s not the nightmares waking me up, it’s the pain. But I can’t stay awake either. No more than two hours at a time. Everything is too bright, too loud, too fast, too much. All day drooling. Literally. It’s gross. My chiropractor says it’s normal. At every adjustment, I make a puddle on the floor beneath his table through the face slat. I drool through the paper sheet that protects the table cushion from the oil of my face.
My zitty, nasty face that has exploded. So has my back and chest. I even have a zit on my ass. Not that I can turn and see it in the mirror. But I can feel it. It’s actually not a zit. It’s a boil. A big-ass boil on my butt. Hurts to sit on it.
I’m always on my butt. I’ve been sitting so much that, in barely over a week, I have worn a hole through the skin that covers my coccyx. “Jeep butt,” my chiropractor tries to joke, but that’s the malady’s nickname because people who ride a lot in jolting jeeps get it, too. I’ve had no joy ride. Just too much sitting on a twisted coccyx.
All day I stare at nothing. Staring and sleeping. That’s all I do. I watch a lot of TV but it’s not really there.
I’m not really here.
Except when the spasms hit. In those seconds and in the groaning aftermath—oh, I’m here, alright. I’m not entirely convinced that I want to be.
I’ve been shouting everything I say and didn’t realize it until I started to calm down after my parents cleaned my pig-sty apartment. Didn’t realize how badly that was getting at me either. I’m not realizing a lot of things….my social graces are gone.
I got dad lost last night when we had to go the back way to Walmart because it was rush hour and the thought of being on the freeway, trapped among other cars about made me batty. I don’t wanna shower, I don’t wanna eat. Even though I really need to. I’m yelling at everyone and I can’t concentrate. My rage level burns just below the surface and flares at the slightest thing. I can’t work out things in my head. My dad was trying to explain something to me last night that dealt with money and figures and dates and my stupid concussion was getting in the way of my brilliant mind.
I AM NOT STUPID!!!
I feel stupid.
I’m so flippin’ frustrated and I can’t even dance it off. That’s the way I’ve always handled anything that bothered me—just put on the music and dance and dance and dance!
But I’m trapped in this body that grows more and more painful with every day. I find more and more problems every day, and I have no outlet for it except crying and SCREEEEEAMING! I have all this pent up emotion which is only compounded by all the bureaucratic bullshit red tape and one frustration after another because of stupid holiday closures.
It’s friggin’ freezing in here because my pilot light blew out and I have bad circulation now. My hands fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I can’t concentrate. I’m fritzed out and snappy. I’m repeating myself all the time.
So many people have told me that they had whiplash and they have tons of problems years down the road.
I was SUPPOSED to be an internationally known belly dancer! I was SUPPOSED to have my first overseas gig in a few months. But now, IF they still want me, it’ll be postponed. IF I can still go, how can I feel worthy of them bringing me? I won’t even be at half what I was before the accident and with no extra training to make up for my youth and inexperience compared to Dakini. I was feeling like, if I worked my butt off for January and February, maybe I could be worthy of being flown across an ocean.
But now? I can’t even give them what we sent on the video. I feel like I’ll be a fraud if I go. I feel like I should wear a sign: “I know you were expecting Nadhra. Well, all we could bring was this pathetic lump. Sorry. She had a car accident.”
I can’t even walk right, so dancing?
Hahahahahaha…
Good one. Here are the moves I can’t do:
Any of the innumerable forms of shimmy—the base move of this whole flippin’ dance form!
Any of the various figure 8’s
Undulations & body waves
Rib/hip circles
Rib/hip slides
Rib/hip drops
Shoulder shimmy
Shoulder roll
Head slides and circles
Zar head fling—heck, any kind of head fling. I can’t even turn my head.
Lunges
Turns & spins
Floor work of any sort
Half of my arm movements.
Boy…what does that leave? Hands & eyes. Fuck me.
No. Fuck this! It will come back. It will. It’ll just take time and hard work but I will get it all back.
Dammit, I WILL. I WILL. I WILL!
Later…
Mom brought me to a meeting for Mothers Against Drunk Driving tonight.1 Eight women. We survivors, our caretakers, and all the bereaved. They really shouldn’t put us in the same room together—we breathing ghosts and the bereaved. I listen to their horror stories. I tell a little bit of my own. But I don’t tell them the truth.
“If this is all I have to look forward to for the rest of my life, then it would have been better if she had just killed me. Because I’m not actually alive. I’m merely breathing.”2
After hearing a bunch of the survivors talk about their brain injuries—apparently there’s a difference between having a concussion that heals, versus Traumatic Brain Injury—I am horrified to think that this might not go away.
It’s over a week and my symptoms are not getting better. A bunch of them are actually getting worse. And we keep finding new ones. Every time I go to try to do something, we find more and more things that aren’t working right. If there’s a chance that this might be something I have to “just suck up and live with”?
This is not life. What could ever make all this worth it? What could I ever have to look forward to that would make a lifetime of THIS worth enduring?3
At the MADD meeting, I battle to hold every one of those despairing sentiments back like stuffing hot cinders down my throat, because I don’t enjoy eviscerating people, and some of these women would give anything for one more hour with the ones they’ve lost. My parents would be destroyed if they’d lost me—that is, if my spirit had been fully catapulted out of this hunk of twisted, spasming flesh-and-bone that it still animates.
Not very animated right now.
Unfortunately, they have lost me. I don’t feel like myself. Not at all.
At least I’m not in a wheelchair like one of the leaders of the MADD support group. She can’t sit upright. Can’t speak right. Half her face is sliding down her skull but she didn’t have a stroke. She was riding behind her boyfriend on his motorcycle when a drunk rammed them. Pulverized her lower back. Trashed her brain.
And then the fucker laughed.
He was in line at a grocery store, bragging to his buddy about what he’d done to her. He had no idea her sister was operating the checkout register and heard every word. Now I listen as this sweet, intelligent, personable woman tells me the tale, slumped over in her wheelchair, slurring and stuttering worse than I do. All the others have heard this story and they froth in support. I froth, too.
They did wind up arresting the prick, and she had to face him in court.
He laughed at her there, too.
I’ve never experienced the kind of hatred that makes me wish evil things on another person before. Not during the decades trapped in my hometown of Hell. Heck, I didn’t even feel this for the predatory asshole who raped and assaulted me. Now these abominable images flicker in, whisper like devils, then flash away with my wave of revulsion. More often, it goes the other direction.
I want to ask if she ever wishes that he’d just killed her.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I did. Couldn’t stop it to save my life. After nearly an hour of holding it back, I think I just blurted it out my hole, right there in that room full of bereaved women, haunted by we ghosts who are still forced to recycle air and shove food into our drooly, slack mouths, cud-chewing until it it all tastes like ash.
Now as I lie in my bed in the dark, thinking back over the meeting, I am struck with a snapshot of horrified eyes. Mouths shooting open. Heads retracting in abhorrence. Yup. I’m pretty sure I actually said that out loud. I’ve been doing that all the time lately. Things I never would have voiced in a million-and-one years. They just sorta fall out my face now.
BLURP.
Like a stinky, steaming mass on the table between us. Or splattered down the front of somebody I love, all covered in bile frosting with a shiny, red “FUCK” on top.
I can’t stop swearing.
The MADD gals say that’s normal, too, because my head slammed against the driver’s side door. Apparently profanity is not connected to the vocabulary center of the brain (of which mine is damaged) the same way that normal words are.4 Well, I might not be able to get sentences that make sense out my gob, and I might be flop-flipping half my words or the first walf o’ my herds, but boy-howdy, can I swear!
I originally learned profanity the same way Ralphie does in Christmas Story—at the right hand of my father. Plus, I’ve always been a tomboy. I hang out with a lot of guys and adopted their lingo. I’m fluent in Dude.
But I can also be Miss Office Extraordinaire or Miss Elegance in my red velvet gown with the 18-inch fringe and red suede pumps.
Well, I used to be.
The mere thought of shoes with a heel almost sends my back into spasms. And elegance?
Bwahahahahahahah…
Swearing is an art, right?
It sure is now.
It’s kinda funny in that morbid, dark-chocolate way. Watching those jagged, glowing words pop off my tongue to sucker-punch every other thing I say. I couldn’t stop that if I needed to either. Sometimes profanity is the only thing I can get out my mouth.
Or just…you know…screaming.
Nobody around me thinks the swear-fest is very funny. Especially my mom. She’s sensitive about swearing. Cringes away from me. Embarrassed. I am, too, but what the hell can I do about it? Hopefully it’ll heal. Hopefully a lot of things will heal, because some of them are really awful.
Having zero control over what comes out my mouth? Not being able to keep my thoughts straight or my emotions in check or remember what I just said to somebody five minutes ago? It’s actually not funny at all, but if I don’t laugh about all this, there’s only one alternative.
Okay, two.
The first one makes people squirmy from the violence of how much snot can be projectiled out of my nose and the sheer amount of tears that can pour from this little body and the length of time I can muster up that much energy before I finally collapse into the drooling, nose-plugged coma-of-the-day. (Or the hour.)
This is different from sleep. It’s heavy. It’s just…I’m here one second and then—
BLAM.
Gone. Coming to feels like swimming up from the bottom of the ocean. You know, except when that knife in my spine blasts me awake.
The other alternative to uncontrollable crying or laughter would leave all inanimate objects in my reach as pulverized as that poor gal’s spine.5
People don’t find my humor or my similes very entertaining these days.
Fuck it. I fuckin’ do, and they all have fangs and middle fingers.
🎄 Holiday Hell - Day 9 🎄
December 29, 2000
Mom looks like she’s about to have an aneurism if she doesn’t get to speak her mind. I think she needs to swig a bit of my profanity-cocktail as she hangs up the phone. She just spoke with the DA’s office. The MADD gals gave us a list of things we should ask them, things we should do, along with all sorts of other information.
Like brain injury symptoms.6
I have many of them. In the first category, I have them all. And here I thought my bodily injuries were the thing I needed to worry about, professional dancer that I am.
Excuse me. Was. Until this car wreck. This crash.
NOT “ACCIDENT.”
The MADD gals have taught me well. We don’t call these incidents “accidents.” If you’re impaired from consuming some substance and then choose to get behind the wheel and hurt someone, THAT’S NO ACCIDENT.
It’s actually a felony. “Vehicular Assault.”
If you kill them, it’s “Vehicular Homicide.”
ANNNYWAY… (They tell me my inability to keep my thoughts straight is normal for a head injury, too. “Sequencing” it’s called, and I’ve lost it.)
My mother hangs up her phone call with the DA’s office to tell me that the only charge against the woman who hit me is the DUI. The MADD gals said I needed to get the criminal case rolling and register for something called Victim’s Restitution.7
But the courthouse told my mom:
There was no Victim.
This was a misdemeanor case.
Filed under T for Traffic.
No one had been injured.
Um...
I—
Uh…
Wow.
*rapidly doing a body check as my mother delivers this news to me…*
Yup. Still injured.
And lo, the Sitcom Gallery resounds with the chirping of crickets.
For about 8.32 seconds, I have no air with which to speak. Ohhhh, that’s right. The hospital told the police that I was “perfectly fine,” remember? So that’s what the police told the court system. That’s what they also told the woman who hit me.
(Remember that. It’ll be important later when we learn about her second DUI not long after she rammed me.)
Upon learning that, according to the El Paso County DA’s office, what was done to me is worth less pursuit of a court case than the crime that had been committed against the poor, helpless blacktop of the Colorado Springs streets, I am struck breathless and dumb. This newsflash hovers in the air of my apartment, as glowing and fragrant as my F-Bombs. I can’t even muster up a good ole cuss word.
Until I can.
Even my mom pukes out some profanity.
To everyone’s shock, my father is completely silent.
Once upon a time, a long-distance swimmer name Florence Chadwick embarked upon the quest to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast.8 On that day, the water was icy cold and the fog was so thick that she could barely make out the nearby boats. A support team trailed her in case she needed assistance, and to scare sharks away with rifles.
Her mother and trainer were in one of the boats, encouraging her to keep going. After swimming for hours, Chadwick finally told them she couldn’t go on any longer and asked to be pulled out of the water.
She was a half-mile shy of her goal.
"Look,” she told a reporter afterwards, “I'm not excusing myself, but if I could have seen land I know I could have made it."
When she tried again two months later, the fog was just as thick but this time she understood its disorienting and despairing impact. She not only crossed the Catalina Channel, she did so in record time.
In spite of how enraged I was over learning what Penrose Hospital’s neglect had done to my court case, it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me when it did.
Because with every day that passed in worsening pain, with every new discovery I gained about the reality of my situation, and with every clueless shrug everyone around me gave about how—or even if—my injuries would heal to the point where I would get my old life back, the fog became thicker and thicker, closing in around me until I could no longer imagine anything other than my current circumstances.
Hope began to slip from my grasp.
In its place, all I had was outrage.
As I and my loved ones wrote a pile of letters to get the DA’s office to acknowledge that there had—actually and indeedy—been injuries in that DUI case, and that it was a Vehicular Assault case, not a mere traffic violation, that burning quest kept urging me forward. So did the battle we all had to wage to get my insurance company to pay the self-employment portion of my lost wages—nearly half my income. These were shorter-term goals. Concrete goals with clear wins. Much easier to get my jaws around and clench.
These battles put the bite back into me. They put the snarl back into my gaze.
Good thing. Because I was about to learn that court cases and insurance adjustors had nothing on the beast of TBI.
UP NEXT:
THE BEAST SHOWS UP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE
Holiday Hell: Days 10-11
Galen was scheduled to play at a big New Year’s Eve party with one of his bands. Since I was incapable of performing for my own ball-drop bash, it was decided that I would go with him and sit at the table reserved for the Band Babes, now that I had become one. As a belly dancer, I hadn’t had a New Year’s Eve off since 1992...
This story starts here: BLAM. - My Dance with a Drunk Driver
© 2020 Hartebeast
After studying our combat veterans, scientists are better understanding the link between TBI and suicide
** I am not the person qualified to help with this topic. These people are:
SUICIDE HOTLINE - SMS 988
“What could ever make all this worth it? What could I ever have to look forward to that would make a lifetime of THIS worth enduring?” I’ll tell you what. Actually, let me show you. This is one of my other Substack publications designed to answer that exact question, without delving into all this sticky, NSFW stuff that inspired me to create it. I never could have done this without that car wreck and TBI:
Bonus humor…because…humor:
TBI and Anger/Rage - sometimes this is a neurological response to the TBI, not merely anger over the situation, or even a lost ability to control emotional expression. It all depends on where/how you got hit, what kind of treatment you receive, and who you were beforehand.
Risks of Brain Swelling - not all of the damage to the brain occurs in the initial impact(s).
DUI & Vehicular Assault/Homicide
And yes, when we're talking about court cases, I have ZERO problems identifying with the label "Victim." It is just as valid as identifying with that other thing I am: the “Survivor.” Victim is simply the official, legal term for someone who has had a crime committed against them, not some sort of "oh, woe is me whiner” who just "needs to get over it and gain some agency."
(Fucking hate that buzz-word. Agency. Only because it’s a buzz-word and they all rub my fur the wrong way. Gak.)
Florence Chadwick - Queen of the Channel - RAWR.
Humour can sometimes be the lantern that leads us through the dark times.