A quick note on my use of the F- word. In person, I am full of sayings such as oh goodness and whoopsy daisies. I had a dirty mouth in my 20’s, and it got pretty bad with the F word. So I vowed to clean it up. It wasn’t lady like enough for me, and it was unprofessional. I have no idea how I went from that to my current bag of grandmother sayings. HOWEVER. When things are really terrible, sometimes the only choice is to choose a foul word to elicit the full emotion. I’m sure there are worse words than F, but that would take energy to look up. So if you are offended, I am not sorry.
About a month after seeing the neurologists is when it really started going south. I had been seeing my physical therapist M for a few weeks. Not to be confused with my lover savior angel boyfriend M. M was still living in Vail during this time, so I was alone during the week. He came down to Denver every single weekend to visit me that spring.
My anxiety and depression was through the roof. I was still trying to hold onto my job. I felt like I had a terrible hangover every day. I could not organize my thoughts, my schedule, my day, anything. I would show up to PT crying like someone from an insane asylum.
This post is not easy to write because it was the darkest period in my entire recovery process. I was truly at rock bottom. My brain was so lost, confused, not working. I did not know what to do. I was like a 100 year old person and a baby in one. But I was lost in the middle somewhere. I hesitate to write what I am about to write, but to you other survivors out there, you are not alone. I write this for you. It does get better. I don’t write this for sympathy, I write this for connection, connections not yet made.
After much internal debate I knew I needed to ask for emotional help. I reached out to some local friends to see if they could stop by to ease my isolation. I was not well enough to leave the house to see them. Just say hello for 15 minutes I asked. …. one person did one time. Because I seemed normal to them, they could not quite understand.
I then reached out to nonlocal friends saying I needed support. I got an outpooring of replies within the day and week, it was great. Unfortunately I did not have the brain ability or energy to engage with them. After that first week it was radio silence. I know people are hesitant with uncomfortable unknown situations and don’t reach out because they don’t know how. I have been guilty of this in the past. But when you finally get up the courage to ask for help, and then it doesn’t match your expectations or you don’t receive it, you feel worse than you did before you asked for help. And in my case, this time was f u c k i n g b a d
My mental/emotional/psychological/ brain pain was so bad that I wanted my body to be physically in pain to take the other pain away. I wanted to ease my pain and have no pressure on myself. In full disclosure, I had been at this point once before. Before my brain injury. My grief from losing my best friend S to a brain aneurysm. And two months before that losing our other best friend H from complications from a brain aneurysm as well. My life post 30 had been a new life, a more difficult life. And now my post injury life was like being reborn yet again. My third life in the 36 years of my body and brain.
At this point my PT M set me up with a speech language pathologist (SLP). I can’t remember if I told her about my desire to hurt myself. She assured me the SLP would help me cope and teach me to do some basic things humans do to function. My SLP was also named S. The same name. New angel SLP S was saving me from my own brain and my grief over other S. Working with her felt like someone was helping manage my life, helping me get from wake up time to go to sleep time. I have not thanked her enough.
Miraculously, I swooped out of that darkness. That hell. Swooped right into purgatory.
