Confessions of a Concussed Cyclist: pandemics and injured brains

June 7, 2020

I was recently watching a clip from www.brainlaw.com and I want to start this Confession by sharing some of their words. “Imagine one day you woke up in a foreign country.  Everything looks similar but slightly different. You’re not really sure how you got here.  You certainly didn’t ask to come. And you wish you could just go home. Change is difficult for us all.  Particularly when it happens suddenly, without warning. But for millions of Americans living with Traumatic Brain Injury, this is not the first time their lives have been turned upside down. And adapting once again to a ‘new normal’ may be especially challenging.” 

Just when I thought living with a brain injury would be the hardest thing I would ever have to do, a pandemic entered the scene.  One of the things that makes living with a brain injury so difficult is the amount of mental energy needed to survive a day.  That mental energy taxes an already exhausted, damaged brain.  When you add a pandemic to the mix your daily mental energy needs go up 100 notches and your damaged brain suffers greatly.  

With this pandemic I have lost my routine and five years ago, I quickly learned how important routine was to living life with a TBI.  My current routine is not natural; it’s not intuitive. 

• Stay six feet away from people (not just thinking it but actually having to calculate what six feet looks like is quite hard for me because I really struggle with visual spatial reasoning now)
• Wear a mask (remembering to pack it when I leave home, remembering to wear it when I enter a store, remembering to put it back on if I take it off to answer the phone at work or to catch my breath)
• Follow the arrows in the grocery stores (grocery shopping is so hard on my rattled brain [the noise, the stimulation, the chaos, following my grocery list] now add to it having to follow these arrows in the store for one-way traffic
• Stress is increased greatly with the worry of catching the virus, with the extra work that is required to live life, with the attitudes of people around you regarding the virus, and with trying to keep informed about the latest regarding Covid-19

I got really sick in March with a severe respiratory virus and I am still recovering. So to add to the mental energy pandemic list I also need to remember to do my nebulizer breathing treatments every 4-6 hours (not only is this using mental energy to remember to do this, but it requires mental energy to plan ahead as well to make sure I am home when it is time to do the treatments).  

The staying home part has been easy for me, this is nothing new.  Not seeing friends was a little different (I’m social, just not as social as I was pre-TBI).  But all the rest is taking a toll on me.  A toll that I fear will take a long time to recover from.