“The Strange Days That Followed” or “My New Life and the New Person I Had Become Post-TBI” Part 1

All right, so I covered the Traumatic Brain Incident (TBI) in my last post (https://steemit.com/mental-health/@phoenix32/the-strangest-of-days-or-how-a-traumatic-brain-incident-altered-my-life-inexorably), and I briefly described how I had been affected and what brought me to the point of finding that I needed medications. There are a good number of details that I left out — really, it is going on 5 years now, and it was a solid 2 years to get to the point of meds. I appreciate you reading, upvoting, and commenting, but I also know that know one wants to sit through 2 full years of that stuff, right?

I want to look at the medical aspect of everything. The hospital did their due diligence in making certain that I was stabilized and that I would live. The fever reducers brought me down to 103.5°F (39.7°C), which I discovered was more than problematic — it meant that my fever had been so high that my brain was cooking in its own juices. That might be a delectable concept if I was a monkey who was then decapitated, scalped, and served to Indiana Jones and his friends.

However, not being a monkey, I very much wanted to know what was going on, and as I had stated, the hospital refused to do any tests until they had established that my heart was functioning properly. My protests and offer of signing a waiver fell upon deaf ears; I was dehydrated, malnourished, and was running a massively high fever. By the time that the cardiologist came to see me with the results of the EKG — I was just fine in regards to that, mind you — I was finding that it was a bit late for diagnosis. The only thing that they could say for sure is that it looked like I was recovering from sepsis — however, they had no idea what caused it, since they didn’t run any gorram tests and it took freakin’ forever for the gorram cardiologist to come in and read the EKG. As if my life wasn’t important. As if the hospital said to themselves, “Oh, he’s stabilized, so we can just sit on this. Nothing to worry about here!”

Well, that whole “not having tests run in a timely manner” thing really kicked my stubborn streak into overdrive. See, I’ve always had this romanticized idea regarding the way that I would die. One of the options was the samurai way — in the middle of combat, killed honorably, defending hearth and home and family from some grave threat who would invariably die before I did. The other was that I would die an old man in his bed, surrounded by family, my nieces and nephews and all of their kids all about, crying and yet smiling; I’ll probably be the patriarch, as I will have outlived all of my siblings because I am stubborn.

I am stubborn.

Oh, yes, there was no way in hell that I was going to die in this stinking, sad excuse for a hospital. No, I will live, and dammit, I will not go down without a fight.

So I got stubborn. Not to the point of being obnoxious, mind you — most of them were not responsible for the inherent lack of care to do anything but stabilize me. I was still respectful towards the doctors, although I let them know that the lack of answers as to why I was even in there in the first place really had me angry. Their response: “You have to remain calm and relax.”

Yeah, that’s just the thing to say to someone who is upset. “Calm down.” Uh huh. Now, my lady readers, if the gentlemen in your life tell you to “calm down” when you’re upset, I guarantee that he will be singing soprano in the church choir. And my gentlemen readers, I know it is no picnic when the ladies in our lives tell us the same thing — when Thanos snapped his fingers, there was no way that “calm” was going to be an option, right?

“Calm” was not an option because I was in such pain, the reflux was hurting like mad, and they wanted me to swallow food and pills. As I had posted about the Eastern European nurse, I am grateful that, even though she denied me my ability to cry because I am an adult male, she managed to get someone on the phone in the middle of the night and get my chart changed. I have no doubt in my mind that any doctor who received her call at whatever hour it was found him or herself with a ginormous brick in his or her shorts, enough to pay for all of the medical school. Yeah, she struck me as someone who could intimidate a tyrannosaurus rex.

The discharge was smooth, although the day of also brought the end of my Godmother’s husband’s life. I honestly felt like it was a balance. There was a scene in a series of books that I read, “The Night Angel Trilogy” by Brent Weeks (check it out here: http://www.brentweeks.com/series/the-night-angel-trilogy/), in which one of the characters is “negotiating” with a Hades-type or Charon-type figure regarding survival of a mortal wound, and there is something about a balance — the wounded can live, but at the expense of someone else. Even though our conditions were far from related — Uncle Mark had stage 4 lung cancer and had been sick for months — I still felt guilty over the fact that I was still (sorta) standing and he was now blinking for an exceptionally long period of time.

I was also physically weak. And I mean, lose-another-three-pounds-and-I-am-emaciated weak. The liquid diet was not going to help me put on any weight. I was eating at fairly regular intervals, at least once every 3 hours. OK, I was drinking protein shakes, eating Jello and pudding for snacks. And all of it was preceded by lidocaine to numb my throat and upper esophagus, which tastes pretty much about how you would think it does.

It required a vast amount of mental effort to keep myself awake. I was fortunate that I had a few extra days due to Presidents’ Day weekend and then bereavement. Although the bereavement time was not really restful, per se, I was not working or putting my full concentration into anything job-related. My family drove me around for the funeral stuff, which was right up the road from my apartment, except for the funeral Mass. Serving that was easy in some regards — I am a practiced hand at many of the Church’s liturgies, and as it turns out, my serving at Mass eased some tensions in my family. Uncle Mark’s family and my Godmother were at odds about some of the details, and it was really a sad thing. Most of it was going over my head, although you would have to be in Uncle Mark’s state to have missed the tension in the funeral parlor. Even sitting in the back of the room with my Gpa, all skinny and weak and being worn by our suits, I still picked up on it. I just didn’t have the energy to care. Serving at Mass was, to me, not optional, as I had been doing it since I was 12 years old, and I felt that it was a fitting way to honor Uncle Mark. While he and I had never really been close, he was the husband of my Godmother, and I love her, and it was really all that I had in me.

The side effect was that Uncle Mark’s family was so happy that I served at the Mass. They loved Monsignor, and they found it a unifying sign for the two families, especially when they heard about my hospitalization. I skipped the repast, as there was nothing there for me to eat and frankly, I was so bloody exhausted. Besides, I had to get to work, so I needed to rest.

Thursday came around, February 20th, and I was back to work. I was assigned to three of the schools in the district, and my office was in one of the schools. I met with my supervisor at the high school first, then drove to my office to catch up on paperwork and see what I had missed. I had a work order from the nurse, and I figured that it would be easy to handle her issue. We had a “floater” nurse on staff as well — she was in different buildings on different days — and she was on-site that day as well. The primary building nurse was, of course, thrilled that I was back, and was concerned with the state of my health. I answered her questions as best as I could, and she acknowledged with her professional judgment that I had been pretty close to death. The “floater” nurse, however, demonstrated that “bedside manner” was not a pass that she passed in college. She talked down about men in general and how we can’t handle getting sick and how we make a big deal out of the smallest things.

Mind you… I have stitched my own wounds. I have relocated my own joints. I have a higher pain tolerance than several of my ex-girlfriends, including one who gave birth. So when I say that something hurts, it bloody well hurts. And when I said that I was knocking on Death’s door, sure as shootin’ were my knuckles a-rappin’.

Going waaaaaaay off-topic for a brief moment, that is the sort of thing that inspires some of the “toxic masculinity” that plagues the culture. Men are not allowed to be sick or to cry. And when we are sick, we are told to “suck it” and “be a man.” I honestly felt like I had “sucked it up” and been “a man” at my absolute resistance to dying in that hellhole of a hospital. While that did not seem to be enough for Nurse Ratched, frankly, I figured that she could kiss my grits.

That shaped our relationship from that day forward. I was only business when it came to dealing with Nurse Ratched. I never asked about her kids, I just came in, fixed the broken stuff, and got out of there. I was polite enough to wish her a nice day, but as far as she was concerned, I was all ice.

I remember that clearly, which is important when it comes to discussions regarding my memory and the issues that arose from the TBI. But more on that to come later…