First Signs Something Was Wrong

You don’t really remember much. You just wake up and you’re just kind of in like a state of shock I like to say. And you just kind of realize that, you’re, I mean you’re not yourself. You kind of speak like Mushmouth or Fat Albert a little bit and then you kind of slowly regain your consciousness and when you regain your consciousness you kind of like, you’re not yourself. You’re, you think you’re off in la la land, as we call it. Yeah, I mean, there’s not much to say besides like the background stories too it. But, I mean it’s, it’s one of those things that, we kind of take serious because, I mean, I started off as 11 Bravo, and that’s all they would, which is an infantry man, and that, they’d preach to us day in and day out. “Hey, if you see anybody with signs and symptoms of a TBI or concussion that you, you kind of pull them aside and say “hey, you’re sitting this one out.” Same time, you don’t want to pull your best friend out because you want him to engage in all the fun you’re having, and, I mean, it’s kind of like a hard toll. I mean, it’s like boxing pretty much. You get knocked out and you fall back up again. Or, actually when you see the guys fall down they’re always tensing up. Well, in my mind, that’s the way I kind of see it, is you fall down and, and you’re ready to go when you wake back up.

It was the first time he had spent much time with me really since I got hurt - and you know he brought up, he said that, he said you know, you know, you – I didn’t really notice until I spent a lot of time with you that you don’t really talk the same way that you used to. He pointed out that he had noticed some differences in my speech and particular hesitations for words and stuttering and that kind of thing - which if I think about I would probably do more right now when I’m talking to you, listening to myself talk. And you know he just pointed out that he thought that those things were different, were all, you know, different, different enough from the way he was used to listen to me talk that it was enough for him to remark on. So I went actually to the speech people at the VA after I got back and they started doing some stuff with me and they referred me to the poly-trauma people, the OIF/OEF poly-trauma people, and they gave me this whole battery of tests. I mean you know for me it, it was really the discovery - it was that trip that I took with my father and his commenting on my speech pattern and that kind of thing. And then end up, then I ended up sort of, you know, with that information – thinking, thinking more about that and then also looking at other stuff.

And then in retrospect - and then you have sort of like this you know, confirmation bias or whatever - like once you, once you say, “Oh now I’m thinking about this,” and so, then everything is evidence that, you know. And frankly a potential excuse - I mean if you’ve, you know if you’ve been told that you have a traumatic brain injury – and you know my wife and I had a discussion about this. It’s like – and you know she was doing it, too. It’s like, “Okay, so he forgets something.” You know, we, we’re going to notice it more than we notice it with everybody else and it’s going to be like, oh like if we have an argument about whether or not you know who remembers what’s true about what we’re trying to – “Well it can’t, you can’t possibly be right because of the TBI,” you know? And so, you know, where do you go from there? So, we try not to do that and I try not to use it as an excuse.

I got out and the world was a lot different to me. I did not realize how damaged I was. It took a while. One person I talked to who had witnessed what happened said, "When your head hit that pavement, I heard a sound I've never heard before, and I didn’t know how anybody could survive that," but there wasn’t much pain associated with it. Now I, of course, haven’t done it myself, but it was as though I was having menstrual pains in my head. It was nowhere but everywhere at the same time, and there's so few nerves in your head that you don’t know. I had no insurance, but as a writer, I didn’t really bully the doctors into seeing me, but it's Washington, and so, I did get some follow-up care. I was examined by a neuropsychologist, and to make it even weird, at the same time, I was on probation for a civil disobedience action. He wrote a five-page letter to the judge saying that I should - it's going to take me about two years to recover and I need to self-pace. She said - and this is common with someone who suffered a closed head injury - "You look fine to me. You have to still do your community service." Well, he explained the damage, and the damage was I had contusions to both frontal lobes, which as you know is where words are formed and where executive functions are made. See in this weird way our human body developed - our most important functions are right there, right in front, and some get temporal lobe damage, and my olfactory nerve was mangled. I have no sense of smell, and it took a while for me to realize that like many head injured persons, I initially got well, and then, I entered a period of regression, and I was doing some strange things.

I think after I had gotten out and became a civilian, then I really was able to sit back and reflect. The entire time I was in the military I was either deployed or I was focused on, you know knowing I was going to go back over there so I wanted to make sure on my spare time I lived my life. I didn’t want to, you know, getting ready to go back there and then, you know, be focused on that. And it was all about friends, and drinking and of course ladies because I’m a guy, you know, just being a wild man like we did, because you never know when your next time is. So, yeah, I didn’t really, I think I knew the fogginess was there, I had a little bit of issues. I would sometimes forget things, and just, have to retrace my footsteps but I thought it was probably from pretty much drinking too much or something like that. Once I got out, I really didn’t, I wasn’t in that boys world, you know the dude environment, so, it wasn’t the drinking, because I completely, I don’t even drink anymore, because I don’t have the time or the need. But, from that I started to notice issues remembering things, speaking, like my family members kind of, you know the other guys making jokes about how I’m pronouncing words, because you know. So, that was pretty much when I really realized it. I was able to take a time and actually step back and reflect on myself, and not have to worry about others.

I do recall, the one that’s recorded in my medical records, is the stint in 2005 in Afghanistan. After I left Iraq I didn’t go home. I went to Afghanistan for [the] second war, and in 2005 I was in a vehicle, up-armor vehicle, and a jingle truck, or a traveling truck, they call it, we call it a jingle truck but it’s a truck next to us exploded, causing a concussion wave in our vehicle. I sat at the back right, back right, it was a four-person car with a person in the middle, you know, the turret, and I was at the back right and then it caused the door to swing out and my head went back and jolted, and my knee got slammed with the door and I tore my ACL.

I did not know I had a head injury until I got back home, because I was so worried about the knee. And I couldn’t count things. I couldn’t remember small, short term memory things. I got angry. And I believe that’s one of the things that really presented to me, as a medical provider. I think, the impact of getting into these mood swings. Because you know, I had a hard time self-diagnosing, I tried to self-diagnosing myself, it’s PTSD, PTS, it’s not TBI, but my neck was hurting. My head was, constantly, any sun, like [when] there’s so much snow, it hurts to see. And I know, I mean, I know like, a white out, but it’s at a point where it would give me migraines. Constant migraines every day. So even in, you know, it was when I got back, I just couldn’t think. I couldn’t see things straight. Hard time driving. Coordination and balance, it was all that. And I came to realize, you know, after the surgery, to say “Hey, there’s, there’s something else going on that we need to address.” So [they] tested me, and found out that I might have some TBI.

When I was deployed to Iraq, I was blown up a few too many times apparently. And I wasn’t really aware of a brain injury until I came back and they did a bunch of testing. They did a preliminary TBI screening and it really couldn’t tell anything. But when you’re over there, you’re hopped up on so much adrenaline. And the tempo that we were at, we were never at a big break for long periods of time, maybe a couple days. We were always out in sectors. So, when I got back, the vertigo is what tipped them off. I couldn’t walk a straight line and the docs said, “Do you have TBI?” I was like, I tried, I told them, “No,” because I didn’t know what it was at the time. They did a bunch of testing, and basically, he took two fingers and pushed me over while I was standing on a line with my feet in front of each other. I told him that I had vertigo, which means I was in some kind of concussion. So, it all led back to the TBI.

I had an event on my couch and it scared me. I poured myself a bowl of cereal because I don’t want to grow up, cereal is awesome. I was sitting on the couch about to watch TV and I sat down like the camera is the TV and I was sitting kind of looking at it and leaned back and I went to just kind of sit like this, and my head just went what the fuck. My head just kind of fell and I had no control. I was like hello, please stop doing that, and I sat there for a minute and then I lifted my head back up, but that was a weird event. I had never lost control of my neck. So, I told my primary care physician who was awesome, and she said you need to go to the VA and get screened for TBI.

One night, I was at home. I lived off post with a couple of other buddies that I served with. And I had this headache when I woke up, that was so bad all I could do was just curl up in a ball on the couch, and it wouldn’t go away. And I just tried to clear my mind. And then all of a sudden everything was really quiet, really still. And like I, I noticed that everything was just, something was different and I could, I was aware of it cognitively but I couldn’t like make the thought on it, and then I felt something pop in my brain, like a physical burst. And I’ve told so many doctors this and none of them seem to really have that much interest in it. They think that I’m being metaphorical, but I’m being literal when I felt that it was about the force of shaking a coke can and slamming it on the ground that happened from the pit of my brain. And, then I felt this warm sensation rush over the back of my head. On the, internally, not on the surface, not on the skin, it wasn’t like getting hair standing up. It was internally I felt this warm liquid feeling comb over my brain and my eyes like swirled open, like the beginning of James Bond, you see that swirl. That’s what happened with my vision.

And then I lost all emotional control and I was just balling and crying for hours and hours. And sobbing, just hysterically, and I couldn’t make a sentence. I couldn’t talk. Like I couldn’t call for help to my roommates. All I could do was cry and sit there on the couch and it was dark and, so, like after, I don’t know how long it was of feeling this, but I finally could like put two and two together to grab my phone. But, I could see things in there but I couldn’t make sense of any of it, I couldn’t like, make out a name. But I somehow like, I could recognize my girlfriend’s name, beyond anything, and, so I called her and she said, at the time, and we’re not together anymore but I, I’ve talked to her about this a few times since, and she said it was just like four hours of me doing that and she couldn’t get me to talk or say anything and all I’d did was just cry and sob and. And I finally, I guess, fell asleep.

And I woke up the next day from a phone call, from my sergeant yelling at me for being late to PT. And all I could do was sob. And he couldn’t get me to say anything. And eventually he got out of me that I was at home and, and then eventually told me to just get the fuck to work. So I put on a dirty uniform, and went to work, and it was really difficult to get through the day and drive and, like, I couldn’t even turn my radio off. Like it was blaring when I got in. I couldn’t like -  somehow I got to work and then left my keys in my car with it cranked, and my lights on in the parking lot, and then he tried to tell me to go move some bricks and I just fucking snapped and I was like, “you’re not fucking listening to me, something’s wrong.”