Richard

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.

The emergency care was horrible, terrible. I was released from the hospital after 14 hours, no special instructions and vomiting, basic biology text Victor and Adam's head injury, vomiting, 72-hours observation. The CAT scan didn’t show any damage, but it was taken too - right away, it takes. So, as you know, one of the sequela, one of the things that happens afterward, is that - well, if I hit here or you get hit here, it swells up, it goes down, everything's fine, but with the brain, the swelling has no place to go. And, if it's not treated, you run a serious risk of brain swelling and cutting off your brain stem, and you can either die that way or become a vegetable - it's not that unusual, and they don’t really know. So, I went back to where I was staying and did the worst thing I could do, fell asleep. Well, that morning, I had uncovered some dirty dealings with a mafia-run company for an investigative firm. The person I reported to called me up and said, where's your documentation you were going to bring us. I don’t remember what I said, and I went back to sleep, and immediately, the phone rang again and he said, "there's a taxi outside.  It's been blowing its horn for five minutes. It's going to take you to my doctor."  So, he did. I walked in the doctor's - he came out in his lobby, took one look at me and I think my eyes were crossed, and said, you're going to the hospital, and I went in and I was there for a week. The kind, warm surgeon came by and said, "Well, if the swelling doesn’t go down, we're going to put in a sieve," and I remembered from John Gardner's Death Be Not Proud about his son's brain tumor where he told a friend, "Yes, I could hear them drill." Anyway, but the steroids that they gave me prevented it from swelling too much. So, I got out after a week and I wasn’t feeling all that great.

I had no money, which was very difficult as well, and I'm not working really well at all because all of a sudden, everything was kind of slow. It was as though I was - gum was stuck to my shoe or as one of those old deep-sea divers in one of those big outfits with the leg, yes, and things just weren't - as I know now, the brain was working to rewire, and because sides of the brain, when this side does something, the other side has a sympathetic response, but because of my damage, it was getting like nothing. It was not - it just was not good, and I couldn’t understand it. 

You do appreciate life more. Of course, you know how brutal it can be, and hit the pavement, I mean, that’s pretty brutal. Three blocks from the Capitol. Yeah, yeah. But again, friends help me.  And I then had this series of heart attacks, was homeless. Send me money. No one would accept a penny in return. They simply wouldn’t do it. You know, I’d send them a check, they won’t cash it, and stuff like that. And they just helped out just a lot.  And it was, unfortunately my family, my biological family helped out like negatively, which, which was not good. 

And, sure you grieve the loss. And seeing the MRIs and the white spots in my brain that are permanently damaged and simply won’t get better. But then I grieved that loss and that was key. I needed mental health care for that. And so, I voluntarily checked into a top-notch psychiatric hospital. My dad’s well-to-do, so, on occasion he decided to be my father - visit every 10 years or so, yeah, he helped with that. And that’s where I learned to separate the psychological damage from the physiological damage, grieve the loss, and move on. Again that’s, that’s where words are formed and all of the sudden, you know, I started on Newsweek, and dadada.