Concussions and the things you learn about them the hard way

 Hello world, does anybody read blog posts anymore? It seems like there are so many blogs out there that it's hard to imagine anybody will care about what I have to say. Except, I feel like it needs to be said. About five or six years ago (it's hard to keep track of time when you're busy trying to keep your head above water), I sat at the opposite end of a soccer field and watched my kid's head hit the ground. 

I knew it was a concussion even though nobody else believed it. Just like I knew the gender of my kid while still pregnant, even though everybody else swore up and down that it would be the opposite. It doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference at all what I knew, and when I knew it. It doesn't change what happened and it doesn't change the fact that I couldn't do anything to stop it or to make it better.

Long before I ever got pregnant I swore my kid would never play soccer because of the risk of getting a concussion. But, she wanted to and I made her promise that she wouldn't use her head. So she didn't. It happened anyway. Instead of headbutting an airborne ball, she fell backward while in net and hit the ground. All I could do was watch.

That was the first one. But it wasn't the last one. 

The next time, I wasn't there. It was at school. She collided with a friend. Both ended up with a concussion and the other girl got a broken arm as mine accidentally stepped on her trying to get out of the way. It was years ago. They're still friends and the bone is healed.

That was the second one. It took a little longer to recover but she seemed to be better.

Then, a few months later she was in gym class. They were playing basketball so there were a lot of balls flying around. When it was time to clean up, she got hit in the head by a flying basketball. Before she had a chance to recover, six more balls made contact. It was the end of the class so it flew under the radar. As she was making her way to her locker, a kid threw a Nerf football from the other end of the hall and it hit her square between the eyes. When I picked her up from school she was green and couldn't stand up. 

It was a Friday and there was only one week to go before Christmas holidays. I had heard that the old logic of keeping movement to a minimum was now replaced by recommendations to get moving as soon as you can to speed recovery. So I suggested that she take it easy but go to school. At some point between classes she found herself standing beside a cinder-block wall, chatting with a friend, when somebody asked if she knew where Eva was. Completely forgetting the wall she turned her head in the direction of her classroom with the full force of an individual that is oblivious to the cement obstacle in her path.

That was it. After that she couldn't get up for three months. That was four years ago. She's still struggling.

We all are. A concussion isn't just a traumatic head injury to one individual. It's a life altering event for them and their entire circle of family, friends, acquaintances, and every degree of separation hence forth.

The funny thing is that despite all the lip service, when it lands in your sandbox, you quickly realize there are no real supports, only a never ending spiral of misinformation, neglect and confusion. The more help somebody needs, the less likely that they will receive it... especially if they live outside of the right catchment area.

Hospitals, it turns out, have two things in common: each tries to distinguish themselves with a unique area of expertise that they can showcase, and each limits access to their services to a very close cropped geographic area... this despite happily accepting Provincial tax dollars. So, I pay for services I have no ability to access. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

Of course we tried going to doctors. All sorts of doctors. You wait months to get in and you drive for hours only to be told that you should really get the anxiety addressed. It seems the experts of the day all feel that the only thing to be done to help with concussion recovery is antidepressant medication. 

How's this for dark humour? Patient: Doctor, I have a traumatic brain injury.  Doctor: There's not much we can do, it's all in your head. Is it? Is it now?

No, it isn't. To begin with we're a little lucky I suppose that she needed glasses anyway because otherwise we may not have learned that hitting your head can result in a narrowed field of vision and convergence and divergence issues. In other words, you start to see the world through a fishbowl with blinders. So, we got vision therapy.  

They started her off with syntonic phototherapy. It's supposed to help with retraining the brain to help with balance by desensitizing it to certain wavelengths. I'll tell you, every time I picked her up I was wondering if it was doing more harm than good. But, we had to do something and in the end, supposedly it got a little better. While that was going on, they also did conventional vision therapy, to get her eyes to figure out how to work right. So, eventually the double vision eased up.

About two thirds of the way through the government shut down the doctor's offices for a few months because of COVID19. By the time they were allowed everybody was hurting. So it was only a matter of time before they started feeling like they were paying us for the privilege of helping my girl. So they just decided that she was done. I don't know. Maybe they were being honest. But really I don't think that they were. They just made a business decision. Just like all the other doctors and other healthcare professionals who make business decisions about not taking overly burdensome concussion cases or not getting certified to care for kids under 18 years old. 

It's shocking how few providers there are who are willing to help kids with concussions.

When we did finally stumble on to health through hearsay and gossip links that eventually, maybe, put us on some sort of path to recovery, we realized just how little we had done until now. Even so, we are just scratching the surface of related issues that must be addressed if the minds infamous neuroplasticity super-power is ever to kick in. 

Oh, and we haven't even started talking about the immense controversy in the fields of mental and medical health: can you treat traumatic brain injury without treating the mind and the other way around. Most providers seem to believe that they can do one or the other but it's not their problem that they've picked one or the other and they aren't going to worry about treating the human body as one complex and interdependent system. That's on the kid to figure out... or not. 

Oh, and we also haven't mentioned the link between hormone dysregulation and concussions. Consider yourself lucky if the provider you are talking to is aware of the link but damned if they're going to touch that one with a ten foot pole or a 2.5 year waiting list.

Modern reality: where dog poop makes people more upset than Kristallnacht

This week something happened in a local high school that served as a reminder that Kristallnacht could happen again. What followed after makes that realization sink even deeper.

As so many communities do these days, ours has a Facebook group. Aside from the odd question about what contractor people recommend for a small job of some sort, there where three posts. Two of them really got people's blood boiling. One had to do with a toy table that somebody had left out and nobody bothered removing months for months. The other had to do with people not picking up after their dogs.

In between I posted the following and while I suspect many read it, most rested silently. Only a handful even acknowledged, let alone responded. It's not a sign of the times. It's an omen. A scary one.

This is what I wrote:

"So, I just wanted to share something that happened at a local high school this week. But, first, to not assume that everybody remembers, today was not only the day that many schools commemorated Remembrance Day.

It was also the end of Holocaust Education Week. As well, this week marked the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (if you don't know what that is, please take a brief moment to look it up).

As well, it is the week that finally saw our Canadian government issue a formal apology for Canada’s 1939 decision to reject an asylum request from more than 900 German Jews aboard the MS St. Louis ocean liner, sending them back into Nazi hands, where a quarter of them subsequently perished. This apology came on the heels of last week's shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 more people died.

If you feel that these things are all far and remote, either in distance or in years, they are not.
This week, at a local high school, a boy ran up to the classroom of a Jewish teacher and shouted, "which one of you are Jewish?" to the students who happened to be out in the hall. The fact that this teacher is Jewish was known to him as he taunted the shocked observers and threw a bag of dimes on the floor. He wasn't acting alone. Standing, watching, by the wall were a group of girls. Though he ran like a coward when the teacher demanded that he come to face her, the girls did not run. They didn't show any sign of shame and they refused to tell the teacher who the boy was.

Today, the school took measures to punish the boy and comfort the kids in the class that witnessed what happened. But, so far, those girls, the willing mass participants, as far as I'm aware, were not punished.

If you pay attention to the news, anti-semetic sentiment is on the rise, even here in Canada. Even now, in 2018.

On November 11th, all manner of media will be flooded with beautiful photos and drawings and the words "Lest We Forget," likely followed by a heartwrenching melody. We'll likely see images of soldiers who lost their lives in service or maybe even due to PTSD and watch the few remaining vets, along with their modern counterparts lay wreaths at various ceremonies. But, unless we learn to remember the second half of that phrase, long since replaced by three hollow dots, history truly will repeat itself, and all those brave men, women and children would have died for absolutely nothing."

One person responded. She wrote:

"This was well said, especially in light of recent tragic events. My family stems from four sole survivors of their respective families that lived in concentration camps during WWII. Two of them were Jewish, two of them were catholic and their country was invaded by nazis and they were tortured in camps. The heinous torture that the witnessed and endured is enough to make you ill. We have heard the storeys from their mouths to our ears.

It’s extremely important to remember that people suffered and were persecuted for reasons fueled by hate and propaganda- and it it’s still going on today. And not even only far away. I have personally even seen swatiskas in a [local] park. That may seem harmless to some people who have never experienced such discrimination, but to those who have, it’s a terrifying message that you are unwanted here and need to go away. We have seen it time again where the creators of such vandalism take the opportunity to violently send their message to innocent passerby’s. I personally know of victims of such assaults in Toronto.
 
It’s important to remind our children that there is zero tolerance for discrimination of anyone. It’s not good enough to remember the suffering and thank those who helped. It went on for way too long and it should never happen again (to anyone, anywhere). I think that is the underlying message of Remembrance Day. It’s sad to me that those girls in your story cowardly did nothing to stop it...it’s a sensitive topic for many, but that’s how it starts."

Less than ten people liked the like button and nobody commented. It became simply another forgotten dialogue with one more response from me and a final. "Exactly," from her.

"Exactly," I wrote. "What we never seem to mention is that Hitler came to power through popular consensus, in a democratic election, on an economic platform. Long before the Nazis figured out how to gas in mass executions they burned people alive in pits not far from where the winds carried the stench of human flesh to nearby villages. People knew what was happening and said they did not. This is how it starts. A bag of dimes boldly thrown on the ground and a vile cat call, in a multi-cultural hallway, in a place where nothing like this could ever happen."

After that things went back to the status quo. Another posting about some mundate household chore that the owner doesn't know how to handle.

What did Shakespeare write? Something wicked this way comes ... . Oh, but, it's okay it was said by an old witch, and she was probably Jewish.

You'd better listen because this is how it starts

At the National press conference held earlier today to announce the release of the Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, CEO, Frank Dimant (noted spokesperson for grassroots Jewry) commented that many of the tactics we are seeing today are reminiscent of the antisemitism experienced in the 1930's. He called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) a recycled Nazi-era strategy - then used against Jews, now being used to target the Jewish State.

For the video of Frank Dimant's opening  remarks visit www.bnaibrith.ca

APRIL 11, 2014, TORONTO -- On the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover during which Jews around the world will join together to recall their ongoing struggle for freedom and national Jewish liberation, the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada, is announcing the results of its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents.

Canada-wide incidents of vandalism and violence increased by 21.6% and 7.7% respectively over the previous year. Only incidents categorized as harassment showed a decrease, dropping by 13.9%. Overall, there were 1274 cases recorded, a 5.3% decrease from the previous year's Audit. Reporting of harassment may well be down as Jews have expressed apprehension regarding possible social repercussions and retaliation in the workforce such as losing one's job.

"The sustained level of antisemitism in Canada when taking a ten year view which shows a 49 % jump should be of great concern to all Canadians" stated Frank Dimant, CEO of B'nai Brith Canada. "Jews of all ages are being targeted at home, work, school, and even at play. Notwithstanding Canada's national and international efforts to counter antisemitism, a strong pattern of this prejudice continues to prevail across this country.

"The numbers are only part of the story. What we are hearing from callers is a growing sense of dread among Canadians," said Frank Dimant, CEO, B'nai Brith Canada. "Although the numbers for this year are down slightly, hatred of Jews has veered so far into normative discourse that it is no longer seen as wrong.

"Antisemitism was seen by many in the Jewish community as a thing of the past. However, the de facto replacement of 'The Jew' with Israel, combined with the constant barrage of Holocaust imagery in relation to the Jewish state and Jews and its supporters create a visceral sense of apprehension. The fact that Europe with its Western society and similar socio-economic status to Canada is seeing dramatic increases in Jew-hatred and intolerance cannot help but awaken a tremendous feeling of communal unease.

"On campus, the problem is further exacerbated by unending streams of anti-Israel resolutions by student governments creating a situation where the once week-long Israeli Apartheid Week now spans the entire school year. At the same time, Jewish and pro-Israel students are derided as racists, Nazis and baby killers. This kind of harassment has marginalized and silenced their voice . That this type of imagery is so prevalent as we get set to mark the 66th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish state and 69 years since the liberation of the death camps is disconcerting to say the least.

"While Government officials have strongly condemned antisemitism including the rise of the new-antisemitism, Police and Attorney Generals have shown a reluctance to resolve complaints such that it is easy to see why Canadian Jews have resigned themselves not to report all incidents.

"We will embark on an educational campaign to encourage members of the Jewish community to stand against apathy with a renewed fortitude to directly confront bigotry in their midst while working with B'nai Brith Canada and its League for Human Rights."

A message in a botttle

This is a message in a bottle that I hope you'll find one day.

This is a love note of the deepest kind that I know you'll stumble onto by accident when you'll need it most.

I'm putting it out here because I can and because I don't know how else to leave it.

First, I love you. I've always loved you. I've always known you would exist and be incredible and that is exactly who you are.

You are amazing and beautiful and talented and fragile and wonderful.

You are the most delicate of flowers and the strongest of people.

You are an iridescent precious gem and only ever need to compete against one person. Love whom you love and be who you are and know that you always have a home and are never alone.

Second, of fear I need you to know that nothing is yours to punish yourself for. If somebody (especially me) says that you are hurting them, that you are going to cause them to be in pain or anything like that, or worse, it only means please stop. But you are not responsible for anything beyond that...even if you didn't stop because you didn't want to or you couldn't. You are not God. You are not destiny or the angle of death or anything insanely crazy like that.

Be responsible but do not carry guilt.

You are a good person and have a fire inside you that is beautiful and you are wonderful and I love you always.

You existed long before you were born and will exist long after I die. You were meant to be exactly who you are and yours is to love those who deserve your love. You know who they are. For all the rest, as hard as it may be to turn and walk away: once is their fault, twice is yours. 

Remember that the right answer when anybody asks you "who do you love" is first and always "me" because without loving yourself how can you ever truly love anybody else? I love me and that is why I love you because you are all the best of me that is within my power to give you. But I am not you. You are greater than the people who made you. 

I am by far not your only fan but I can tell you that I have been in awe of you for longer than anybody else. You are amazing and I am grateful that you chose me. Thank you, baby.

l.f.e.

y.g.m.

Here we go again

We're heading into the busy time again. Hopefully this time will be different but it is hard to know where the time goes and harder to know where to find the money. Just spend way too much on something but you can't find it in Canada so you have to pay three times what it is worth to order it from the States. Not sure exactly what they mean by 'free trade' when they try to skin you alive every chance they get just to get it over the border. ... isn't so much the governments as it is the couriers. I sort of wish I it was even half practical to go drive to Texas and get it myself.

... argh I never know how this thing is humanly possible but it comes out each time so we'll see if we can pull another rabbit out.

Bullies need victims and I am nobody's victim

As a child I never got bullied. I got teased, tormented and ostracized. Large groups of kids would surround me and pick on me and tell me that they would kick the crap out of me after school. Once, a girl in my class opened to door to the change room while I was half naked so that the boys could see me. Another time this girl who supposedly had a part-time job as a wrestler followed me to the bus as I went home and smacked me on the head as I got on.

For years some guy used to crank call my house whenever I got home and say obscene things to me. We thought he must have known me because when I wasn’t home he wouldn’t call. Then there were rumors about guys from my school who had been arrested because they had gotten caught stealing or something like that and the calls stopped. When they came back, so did the calls.

I didn’t go to dances or have anybody to talk to at lunch except for one or two close friends who were quick to turn their backs on me when they realized that it was causing damage to their reputations to hang around with me. Some days it was really hard being alone. Usually I just threw my head in a book and read, read, read. Not to escape but for something to do.

I joined clubs at school but everybody seemed to belong and I never really did. I didn’t know what it was like to go to parties or experience that dreaded peer pressure. I watched a lot of TV and Nancy Reagan kept telling kids to say no to drugs and there were all kinds of warnings about condoms and so on. I kept waiting to put those teachings into practice but there were never any opportunities. It’s not that I was an overly good kid. It’s just that nobody bothered.

Then I started to feel like there was something wrong with me. Everybody had boyfriends and went out on dates and the one guy I met at art camp at 12, going on 13, went to school in Ottawa. Technically he was my boyfriend but even though we never broke up we never saw each other and I can’t remember more than two or three letters. We did go out once or twice when he came back but it was really nothing worth remembering. All I remember the first time he insisted on kissing me was saying “great, now that we have gotten that out of the way, can we get on with the rest of the relationship” and him laughing like I was a silly little girl and saying that no, we were supposed to keep kissing. He was 16 and back then seemed so much older.

Truth be told, I never felt all that attracted to anybody in any sort of sexual way until my early 20s but felt like I should have been because everybody else seemed to be. So I did stuff that I shouldn’t have because I was trying to be normal and wanted to do more than fit in. I wanted to be the kind of cool that didn’t care. Inside I called myself a whore and kept waiting for somebody else to call me that but nobody ever did. 

According to everybody else I always got the hottest, coolest guy in school but I never noticed that. As soon as I would end up in a relationship I would try to make it THE relationship, knowing that it wasn’t. I tried to play house because I wanted things to be normal. But I always knew they weren’t.

Have I ever been in love? Absolutely! I fell in love completely when I picked up my baby girl and she, still and infant, patted my back as I hugged her. That was the first time I felt anything close to the sort of zing that you hear about and read about and see in movies. 

But have I ever been bullied? Where I come from you don’t get bullied. You get persecuted. My people have been hated for years and the whole world is usually trying to get us. We are fighters and each time the mob of she-women descended on me in the school halls and outside, I fought back. I never just took it. One time I looked up and actually saw a teacher full body on top of one of them holding her off to try and break up the fight. 

Sure my knees shook but they shook after. They still shake after. But during a fight, I fight. I fight with fists and feet and knees and words. Sometimes I fight thin air because of fear and pure adrenaline and then I get in trouble. Because now I am fighting nobody or people who don’t deserve it.  I’m still going. Liking the Engergizer Bunny I’m still going. 

Then I crumble. This morning I woke up at 2 a.m. because I dreamt that my house was on fire. We weren’t in our actual house but it felt like some sort of home of mine, one that was new to me but mine, almost like the way you feel when you go stay at your parents place after you have already settled into a family of your own. My husband was in a room and he had that guilty look on his face that he has when he comes in after a shmig. He never smokes inside but I smelled smoke and asked him if he started smoking inside now and we had a little moment. I pinched his nose and was about to ruffle his hair and kiss him but looked up and saw smoke coming through the ceiling. We freaked and he ran to take care of it. I ran to get my stacks of papers and computer. 

It’s not that I didn’t care about the kids. I just knew we had time and that they would be safe but the papers I had to protect: our passports; our identity; then my taxes and all the business stuff, and then my laptop and camera. I could smell the smoke. I didn’t think you could smell smoke in a dream. I woke up and knew it was a dream, only peripherally double checking there was no actual smoke anywhere.

In the dream I remember starting to feel like I’m choking so I dropped everything and went looking for the kids. It felt good to drop everything and not care about anything except for the kids. It always feels good to do that.

Right away I google the meaning of a house burning down in your dream and guess what I get: it means that I feel like my external world is crumbling. How true. For the first time in my life, I had found a home to call a home. Everything felt right and now it doesn’t. Everything I was doing was for something and now that something has been taken away and I’m stuck with all the stuff I was doing and in the mean time there are people out there who think I care. I don’t care but now I am obligated.

So now I am angry. I need a way out and a way to escape and it feels like the world is burning down in a way that it never has before and do you know why? Because of all the things that somebody could say to me to hurt me there is really only one little phrase that I can’t seem to let go: nobody likes you. You are unprofessional and nobody wants to deal with you anymore. 

Three people have said this to me lately. Why? I know their reasons and who (or what) they are. I know that they are doing this to try and intimidate me and to control me and because they know they can’t. I know. But I still feel raw. I hate them for making me feel this way and the stress, at my age, is showing my age. It is coming out in physical manifestations and for that I hate them more. Because then I get scared. I get scared that I won’t be there for people who do matter; who do care; WHO DO LIKE ME.

But my, this is a personal letter to be posting in such a public forum and let me tell you why: because I am not a victim of bullying. Bullies need victims like fire needs oxygen. I am not a victim. I am your nemesis. Now, you go worry about me because I will not let my world go down in smoke.

Sometimes I feel like crying

It's been a while
I have something to say
Sometimes I feel like crying

Apologize, move on, keep doing
But nothing feels quite right

I feel so trapped
So indisposed

So used and trampled and abused

It's my own fault
The blame is mine
I don't know how to stop

The spiral is unwinding

Today was hard because I'm scared
Nobody cares what stress
Has done to my imagination

The more I try
The more I die
Inside and on the outside

I feel like all the fates conspired to give and then to take
Away from me the talents they
Instilled and then distilled from me

In the grand scheme
Of life and being
I know that all good

But my small fragile mind and ego
Have more than they can handle

For all my life I have been there
Inside and on the outskirts

Watching the friends and actors play
The strings of social interaction

They make it look so easy
Smooth

I think there's something wrong

Inside my head
The music plays
But not to anybody else's strings

My nerves are tattered
Frayed and snapped

I don't know if its over

The problem is that haters yell
And lovers watch from sidelines
So should I vanish
Dig a hole
Stick all of me inside

And then the more
Obsession strives
To choke my breath from me
Of little babes who truly need
What I am not delivering

It's time I stop
But I can't stop

I need to cry
I think