10:35pm March 5, 2013

And speaking of muddled my brain.

My DPA told me today that I probably have a couple years (barring further setbacks) before my brain goes back to the baseline it was at before the five weeks of delirium hell last year.

She said I’ve done the most straightforward part in forcibly dragging myself back to a semi-adult reading level again. But that the rest of getting things back will likely be much slower and more subtle.

I guess that’s just one more obnoxious medical thing to face. And it’s not like I’ve never experienced anything like this before. It took me years to get back to my best possible capacity after being on high dose neuroleptics for several years. And I never got back all my old cognitive skills after that. So it’s not like I can’t handle another long recovery with possible permanent subtle brain damage again.

It’s just… I’ve had this nasty habit these past few years of being hospitalized before I can recover physically or mentally from the hospital stay before that, and the one before that, going back five years or so with permanent losses there as well. (I wasn’t always stuck in bed all the time, after all, any more than I was always in a wheelchair.)

But for now I don’t seem to be reacting emotionally to this news too much. I trust her judgement or she wouldn’t be my DPA. And I suppose I’ll react whenever it hits me. Which isn’t yet. But I’ve known for years that delirium is brain damage and that this is far from my first encounter with long-term losses from it. So who knows. I’m just writing it down to record it somewhere. Everything seems to be happening fast and at once.

I might actually look around to see what’s available in the way of cognitive rehab because I’ve already done everything I can do on my own (force my brain to work even when it wants to take a nosedive into weird-land). Even this hospital stay I was working as hard to minimize delirium as I was to minimize vomiting – with partial success on both fronts.

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