Subdural Hematoma: (recovery)

I’ve entered a world that was there all along without my knowing it. It’s a landscape with few trails, as they keep telling me, everyone’s experience is different. This is why no one can tell me what to expect or how long it will take. Or maybe they don’t want to tell me because they don’t want me to worry. Sometimes I get blank stares when I worry anyways that I will not be able to work when FMLA runs out, and lose my job.

I went back to the ER today because I had a new, sudden symptom. I was so weak and dizzy in the kitchen. I have to sit down in a chair and think a little bit until I realize that I am nauseous too. I am shaking and close to passing out. I take the nausea medication they gave me that I’ve never used (consciously). The nurse on the line tells me to call 911. The EMTs are very friendly and happy to meet me again. I am disturbed about the fact that I have no memory of meeting them. They ask me if I want to go to the hospital and I tell I just want to live.

Side note: I am not displeased with all this attention from three good-looking men in my living room.

Everyone agrees that since I live alone, it’s best that I shouldn’t have to lie here and worry. Worry itself could be bad for my health. See? Not knowing is worry too. My neighbor takes me to the ER. Another angel. I get another CT scan and the black butterfly has moved closer to center in my brain than ever before. I’m getting better. Yesterday wasn’t made up, when I aced the speech pathology cognitive tests and thought I was feeling energy returning.

No one knows why I had vertigo while sitting on the couch on the phone with the nurse. It wasn’t my heart. It wasn’t blood sugar. It wasn’t another brain bleed or a stroke. I am hoping it is my brain recalibrating, because movement is movement and movement is disturbing and the brain does not want to be disturbed. I will see the neurosurgeon in nine days.

The red tape around FMLA is tangled. The red tape in HR is tangled. Yesterday, the red tape around getting pain meds refilled was tangled. The lawyer is probably on vacation because he left his coat here before Xmas and never came back. Managing being sick has become a part-time job and I’m angry that I have to deal with it while recovering from a brain injury. I want to get audiobooks from the library, but I can’t figure out how to fix my library card memberships, so the cards just sit on my side table.

I am frustrated that there is no road map to all these ‘care teams’, so I create a template with questions and things I have learned the hard way, and send it to the hospital as a gift from a degreed Instructional Designer.

I hope everything will be OK, because then this will be a good story for all to read. I shouldn’t say that because of the goodness that has come from all the people around me.

These are the woods I am in.

The owl swoops down and feathers me with her wings. I wake up in the morning and relive conversations or uncomfortable events or the car crash itself again and again, and I breathe. Let the spirits in. I see myself in the crook of a passageway at the base of my skull with my drum. I am opening the way for the Spirits of Kindness to enter. I am witnessing, as any good shamanic practitioner does. And then the next day, all I can do is sleep and try not to worry. The following day, visualizing healing images of the day before may not work. I have to be open to what is here today, around me now.

2 thoughts on “Subdural Hematoma: (recovery)”

  1. Tasara, I am so glad you are alive and healing. I will pray for you and envision total and complete recovery for you. I just saw your little light email [the last one] which directed me to this blog which I read. Your body and mind and spirit are so strong and enveloped in protective and healing divine light. May you have ease, peace, and joy, as you explore these new terrains of consciousness.

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