It has been about two months since I suffered a traumatic brain injury from a freak automobile accident. In the days immediately following the accident, I mostly grappled with the pain from my missing and abraded skin and the crack at the back of my skull. I had damaged the occipital plate and had bleeding in the region of the brain that normally affects vision.
In short order, I began noticing minor issues that had never affected me before. My hearing, mainly on the left side of my head, was different. I could still hear other people talking, but my own sounds, my speaking voice, my breathing, etc. seemed to be about 30 percent louder. This took some time to get used to. It also had the unintended side effect of making me want to speak less and listen more.
However, the most aggravating effects have been with my word recall. Prior to the accident, and for my entire life, I’ve had an easy facility with language. I was reading at the age of four and got a 36 on the reading comprehension part of my ACT. This was a gift I was born with. Imagine my frustration to see an object and attempt to verbalize what that object is – but wrongly. Not majorly wrong, always close, but incorrect, nonetheless.
For example, I was shopping with a friend a Goodwill store and was headed to a bench to sit at. I told them I would be waiting for them at the booth. Booth and bench both are places to sit, both have five letters, both start and end with the same letter. But it was a bench. The word that came out was wrong. Close, but no cougar. Cigar I mean. You get the idea.
I also have lost words. In another example, I was riding as a passenger in my friend’s truck. I couldn’t pull out the word for the engine compartment cover. The only words I could find were dashboard and windshield. Neither was right. Hood. My friend called it a hood and I remembered it. So frustrating.
I have even called my dogs by different names – by mixing my Lab’s name with my Doberman’s name and vice-versa. I have caught myself doing this again and again. This reminds me of ordinary cognitive decline among the elderly.
My mom started doing this very same thing with my brother and sister’s name in her 40’s. Like bench and booth, they are Stephanie and Stephen. Mind you in her case, they are completely different genders (Not quite the same as both being places to sit) Part of me wonders if I haven’t aged prematurely because of the accident. I’m 48 years old – the same age that my mom started showing signs of this – but prior to my accident, I never struggled with such issues.
The funniest example of this involved a time I told my mom a joke about Alzheimer’s disease. (At 48, I know that the disease isn’t funny, my mindset was different in my early 20’s when I told her the joke) She called me one day to tell me that she tried relaying the joke to her friends in her retirement community. Verbatim she said, “My son Christopher told me a funny joke about Alzheimer's.” Her friends asked “Well, what is it Marie?” to which she aptly responded, honestly, yet accidentally “I don’t remember.” She had forgotten my joke about Alzheimer's in her attempt to retell it.
Candidly, what happened between her, and her friends was much, much funnier than my joke. Once again, spontaneous humor and Mother Nature had bested me.
Note – As a point of interest, in the process of writing this I struggled to spell the word humorous and finally resolved to use spell-check to find the correct spelling.
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