Well, I’m back to sort-of normal.
I feel a bit different, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about “different” because that implies that I understand fully how I was “before” my incident. Rather obviously, that is gone. But I don’t feel much different. There are two things I still notice:
1) I sometimes still have a “hiccup” on a word that I ought to be able to remember. The other day, I was writing a comment, and I had the damnedest time remembering Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s last name. I was stuck on it for 20 minutes and when it unlocked I decided to do a little exercise in which I told myself a bunch of things about JJR in the form of complete “mini-stories” summarizing important things I knew about him, e.g.: “At one point, Rousseau went to go live with David Hume, and the visit did not go well. Rousseau, always irritable and grumpy, more or less ignored his host except to snap at him now and then, and spent most of his time on long meandering walks.
2) Rousseau wrote a book on child-rearing (Emile) that was very popular. What was funny about it was the Rousseau had no experience with children and had fathered several with various prostitutes, whom he then abandoned. Rousseau writing a book on child-rearing would be like if Donald Trump decided to write his own version of Profiles In Courage.
…etc.
When I came to add the bit about Rousseau, his name popped right up on the tip of my tongue. I’m sure you have figured out what I was doing: I was hypothesizing that I have deep memories about Rousseau and I needed to deliberately refresh some of those linkages to his name so I wouldn’t lose them. It seems to have worked. Hiccups when you’re trying to retrieve something that you know you know are almost physically painful: you’re flying down the highway at 105mph and suddenly there are blinking red and blue lights in your rear-view window – your entire attention span collapses down into “arrgh!” and your train of thought crashes and burns.
As an aside [this is all asides, isn’t it?] – as a third-order aside – let me note that when I was an undergrad (83-5) the Psychology department was just starting to begin its invasion of neuro-science, so that was still unfamiliar territory. Hopkins, where I was enrolled, was very much in the “Skinnerian” tradition of behaviorism: you are not allowed to talk about an animal’s “inner states” or “thoughts” but only about observable behaviors or actions. I always say that as a “too little, too late” reaction to popular Psychology’s tendency to hypothesize at agonizing length about the unmeasurable un-observable things inside a subject’s mind. Anyhow, it seems to me that neuroscientists and Psychologists ought to be interviewing/studying people with brain injuries, to learn more about what they are experiencing and how it affects their practical cognition. Unlike the Skinnerians, I am willing to assume there is a connection between brain, memory, and behavior and we can learn things about the brain and memory by asking a damage-sufferer what they are experiencing.
The other thing that has been interesting is the return of my “eye jellyfish” [stderr] – a visual artifact from where the jelly in my eye is getting funky as I age. Up until the incident, I had apparently developed some visual processing routines in my brain that mostly deleted it in real-time unless I looked for it. Very nice. Well, the brain-o caused those visual processing routines to go offline. I noticed this emphatically while I was in the hospital and there was this thing on the wall that I had largely forgotten.
Also – shortly before the incident, I had been trying to learn to stick-weld. I had gotten to the point where I could strike an arc maybe 50% of the time. That’s gone, now. No biggie, I’m re-working the eye/hand muscle memory, but it’s interesting that it got messed up.
As some of you have probably noticed, my strategy coming out the gate was to lean hard on my speech centers and not give them a chance to, I dunno, get used to sitting on the couch or something. So I worked at posting things, speeding up my keyboarding until I was back to my normal rate. That appears to have worked well. My office sounds like distant machine-gun fire, again.
One other “ha ha!” moment occurred the other day when I was drying off from the shower. I looked in the mirror and the guy in the mirror looked like he had been beaten. There was a big 7″ x 7″ bruise on his stomach, his right arm had a 3″ x 3″ bruise above the elbow, and a line of bruises down the forearm. Bruises on the neck and shoulders completed the look. I have to admit I was stunned until I remembered: “oh, yeah, blood thinners.” I had spent some time a few days before assembling my forge body [done!] and I think I must have put my arms around that 300-lb monstrousity to shift it. When I lift things I often use the tops of my thighs or my belly as support. [I once carried an entire table-saw with a cast iron deck up a flight of stairs by resting it on my thighs. Now I have weird knots of scar tissue on the muscles there. Gentlemen: it’s not worth mere bragging rights to do these things!]
Feel free to ask me any questions, if there’s anything about this that is interesting to you.
Yes, I did light the forge. And there was great drama. I just completed making some propane jets that aren’t straight “here’s a 1/4 pipe full of straight tank pressure!” and they give a bit more back-pressure, so the whole thing isn’t quite as uncontrolled explody. I have some really cool video of that but I need to sit down with my video editing tools and see what I can do to make it more ridiculously dramatic.
Isn’t this what “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” is? My memory of reading it certainly sounds like that.
O am really glad that you are almost back to ‘normal’, whatever that word might mean for any of us.
I hav e read that being unable to recall names is not uncommon as one ages. I too have moments when I cannot recall the name of a writer or actor or other public figure that I know I know well. I then have to go through some sort of association process about all the people and things associated with them until I hit on a connection that throws up the name.
Eventually, he was ex-Humed.
As I get older, I find that not being able to pull up a word happens more and more often. It’s an inevitable part of aging, I guess. I recall some study of Agatha Christie’s work that showed a decline in the richness of her vocabulary as time went by.
Anyways, the way it feels to me is that, when younger, I’d have about 5-10 different mental tendril pathways to a word. Thus, if I had trouble heading down one pathway, my brain was able to quickly zip down a different set of connections to get there. But now, as older, many of those other pathways just aren’t as quick or as available, and the word just won’t come.
The other thing I notice is that I’ll get stuck down some wrong pathway. I’ll get maybe a first letter, but hit a word with that letter that is clearly wrong, and I cannot get my brain to leave it. Then for quite a while, every time I try to recall it, my brain heads down that same false pathway. It’s as if it’s laying down a new pathway to the middle of hell, constantly reinforcing the wrong answer. Eventually, I’ll get the word hours later when I’ve stopped consciously thinking about it, and my brain manages to find one of those other, less reinforced pathways, when I’m not trying to force it.
Something that does help these days is Google. I can type in synonyms, or even try to describe the word, and it’ll pop up somewhere in the results and my brain instantly recognizes it as what I was searching for. I had a similar thing happen the other day trying to remember Joss Stone’s name. But a few well-chosen Google terms (“barefoot r&b woman”) brought her right up.
That memory thing is something I’ve been dealing with most of my life. When I was younger I was concussed a couple of times (mostly falling off horses) so I believe that’s why. I also find I need to take a break in the afternoon, in order to function better.
It sounds like you’re doing a type of therapy on yourself to help your brain through this. I know that’s possible, my friend who has a TBI said she initially lost the ability to speak and went to therapy for a while. No one would ever guess that about her now; although, she too has to take a break in the afternoon everyday. Well, taking a nap is not that bad of a lingering effect.
That eye thing would bug the crap out of me, so I hope your brain figures out how to ignore it once again.
Blocking on a familiar name is a thing, for sure. Wait’ll it happens to you while in front of a crowd giving a presentation that you’ve given 50 times before. Like my docent spiel at the computer museum. Ghastly.
Never mind that, just want to sympathize about the blood thinners! Plavix, we hates it. Ugly bruises from little brushes with edges and corners that you barely noticed at the time. They take an instant to create and a week to fade.
I think of it as a 404 error. I can feel the right answer somewhere in the memory files, but no amount of searching is able to locate the precise file you requested. Trying to force it doesn’t work, but the word or name in question usually pops up later that day.
The way memories are connected is very odd to observe in your own thought processes. I just ascribe the 404 hiccups to having far more memory files to search than I had in my 30s.
Brains are fragile. The bony bits on the inside of your skull that cause trauma in a concussion are a serious design flaw. It took several months before my short term memory returned to its preconcussion state. It made me feel incredibly stupid to keep forgetting small tasks, or losing things in my own house because I set them down in an odd location.
Tethys@7: “ It made me feel incredibly stupid to keep forgetting small tasks, or losing things in my own house because I set them down in an odd location.”
Wow. We have a standard joke in our household now about how I put something in a “safe” place, a place where it won’t get lost, where I’m sure to remember where it is, and a perfectly logical place that even if I don’t remember where it is I’ll be able to logically reconstruct where I put it. Yeah, right.
Terry Pratchett described it as “having a demon in the house” that kept moving things around and rearranging the furniture.
Terry Pratchett described it as “having a demon in the house” that kept moving things around and rearranging the furniture.
I personally subscribe to the alternate universe theory. We are constantly slipping back atd forth between two or thre “almost” identical universes which explains why my keys that are not where I put them are there an hour later.