11:03pm July 2, 2014

➸ Coping With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

clatterbane:

Prompted to look at this again, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how many common effects of brain injuries overlap with problems I already had to varying degrees.

I am not so big on the grief model used here, and prefer to think in terms of adjusting to changes. But, I did find this helpful when I was trying to learn more as an adult about an injury in my teens that just never got addressed then.

That was from postsurgical intracranial swelling. I was on heavy doses of steroids for months, to try to minimize the damage. Of course there was some, before they even noticed the problem. But, nobody wanted to admit the obvious. I didn’t have a spectacular knock to the noggin, or obvious alarming aphasia or anything like that, so yeah. I can sort of understand why some medical professionals might have been concerned about liability if they even admitted there was a problem, but my parents didn’t have that excuse (however shitty).

All too often, loved ones say things like “Control yourself”, or “Think how lucky you are to be alive”.

They may mean well, but statements like these only perpetuate grief.

Or at least make it a lot harder to come to terms with the changes, or get any kind of help/accommodations in doing so. The second there was the kind of response I kept getting if I mentioned any concerns about what was going on: denial. And some symptoms getting treated as psych problems. (With some meds making the situation a lot worse for someone already dealing with cognitive problems.) Also a decent bit of impatience, and sniping over things I really could not help. Some of those are continuing effects, not surprisingly.

I mean, it’s kind of weird needing to try to come to grips with something you’ve actually been living with for that long, as sort of the proverbial elephant in the living room. It’s still hard to sort out how much of which difficulties might be coming from what, maybe especially after this long. But, looking into it some did help me feel better, even if that did start over a decade after the fact.

And I’m at least clearer now that I really cannot magically make these problems go away through trying harder or finding the perfect antidepressant or whatever. Same goes for whatever that extra layer of problems got laid on top of. Them’s the breaks.

I’ve always found brain injury survival guides to be very useful to autistic people in general.  There’s a huge amount of overlap in what we need, even if the basis is different.

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