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Sunday, September 8, 2019

Superman takes Kryptonite for his sanity.

There have been many memories returned or revisited these last almost two years.
First the auto accident made everything feel off and unbalanced. My emotions were an instant mess, I felt disoriented and confused,  and even one side of my body felt taller than the other.
Then I started having feelings  and thoughts of "I have been here before, I have experienced this before" in relation to ways my brain was rerouting and functioning.
The chiropractor who suspected a concussion I was seeing did a little test. First he told me some words to remember; they were something like: apple, bubble, and ladder and I immediately recognized the visual pp, dd, bb pattern of the words so I was able to recall them later. I am not sure if he was conscious of this pattern or not, but for me, normally I don't visualize things like that so quickly and hardly care about remembering or making an effort to remember such things. However, it was an instinctive reaction, that was not how I normally function, but that felt familiar. Before he asked me to repeat those words the chiropractor had me track his finger. I was thinking it was silly and wondering why until he stopped. Then all of the sudden my head was swimming and the world was physically and visually throbbing or shaking. "What did you just do to my head," I eked  out as tears started to fall uncontrollably. I had to sit for sometime before the world stopped moving and I was able to drive myself home again.
I didn't know what magic he possessed and how he had done that to my head but I had experienced the world moving like that before, but I couldn't quite place it at that moment.
One of the more interesting things about that concussion was how my brain seemed to know how to accommodate, and even hide symptoms. I could feel the black dead ends that used to be well traveled routes and then I could feel it rerouting; doing something different to arrive at the same place. It was fascinating, confusing, exciting and scary all at the same time. It made me emotional and quiet.
Many strange moments, memories, and realizations have occurred since including the intriguing beard that suddenly spoke my name, and the names and faces that abandoned my recollection as they spoke in familiar tones; including the sensitivities to light and motion that I could not pinpoint as my internal surroundings danced around until my vestibular therapist pointed them out and we put them into controlled contexts. So many strange things I suspect related to TBI/mTBI... So many reoccurrences.
In this last week I had yet another deja vu memory. I feel as though I have been feeling pain more "normally" again since starting this mood stabilizer and I am actually happy for that because I was concerned about how I had not been feeling pain equivalent to the levels of injuries sustained (my ankle and lower back specifically). I laughed as I remembered how I had once before thought of how medication seemed to turn me into a mortal being. I used to claim an iron stomach and rarely ever got sick until I started taking nortriptyline. It worked well but eventually killed my immune system, the culprit for the ongoing flare up of cystic acne, and I was getting sick all the time. It was severe enough I had to stop taking it and my immune system came back. I don't remember what medication came after or if I was able to stop everything for awhile... I think it was lamictal next, but I am not certain. Eventually I went off all of them and was fine for sometime. Though maybe never really as well as I thought. It is hard to tell because so many things can simply be situational. I did go on adderall in 2015 and that has been a God send because so many things would pull too much energy from my brain, that I'd struggle to stay focused and keep up, which caused mild depression.
But since that dang airbag punch the head, my brain and emotions have been all over the place; functioning so differently that I have once again experienced crosses into the immortal realms. Even bigger and "better" cross overs. And as fun and/or fascinating as that may sound, if you have never experienced it, I can assure you, it is not maintainable and a sacrifice worth making so I join the realm of the mortals again (finally)  with the help of quetiapine.
Really, if you think about it: could you imagine how lonely it would be to be Superman? Yet when I take my kryptonite I find I may be more capable.

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