Sorry, we can't find your life
...a dispatch from bewilderness
The thing about going through hell is you also have to bang plastic pegs with a plastic hammer into a pegboard, like kids do in Pre-K. You also roll Play-Doh balls and smash them into Play-Doh “cookies,” then place them on a real cookie sheet.
Once you’ve started improving, you learn — rather, relearn — how to walk, talk, operate a fork, deploy a napkin, pour juice in a glass, get in and out of a chair. If you’re very lucky, you top that by getting up and down steps and getting both to the bathroom and back.
The first company I worked for as a staff writer owned time and life and people. I mean Time and Life and People plus Money and Fortune and Martha Stewart and CNN and HBO. It was called Time-Life. Then I became a freelance writer and a freelance ghost. I was busy. I didn’t have time to be hit by a truck.
In year two and three post-truck, I relearned to read under the patient care of no one at all. But I made a lot of mistakes.
For example, despite using every neuron I had left, words devolved into letters that didn’t stay still. Instead, they kept scrambling so I saw things (or thought I saw) things like “Commuter brain slides into creek,” which really said “commuter train” slid into creek.
I also saw or thought I saw things like, “Thank you for your pitiful donation,” which really said “pivotal?” This was followed by “seeing” “Sorry, we couldn’t find your life,” which really said, “Sorry, we couldn’t find your file.”
There were other problems, too, like I kept banging into things. Like Bigfoot with brain injury, or like there was a magnet in what I banged into and a steel plate in my skull.
Twelve years after I was hit by a drunk with a truck, I began volunteering with patients who had sustained injuries similar to mine. One guy got hit by a bus. One drove into a telephone pole. One woman fell off a scaffold. One was hurt when her husband came home angry and drunk. Brain damage cancels your plans. All of them.
Which brings us to personhood. A cancer survivor said, “You must believe you are a person worth keeping alive.” A brain damage survivor said, “You must believe you are a person.”
“Deploy a napkin”. I love that.
❤️
I don't like what the cancer survivor said. I read it as someone else is keeping you alive?!?!!! I like what you say .. And, I find it overwhelming that you had and continue to have the awesome ability to keep on keeping on .. And recovering, and sharing, and believing, and SHINING YOUR LIGHT!! Sorry you lost a life ... glad you recovered your life ....