Still trying to figure crap out

So it would appear that my physical symptoms of the concussion have subsided. I no longer suffer the headaches that I described earlier. I still get waves of nausea every now and again, but overall things have taken a turn for the better. However, I am still not 100% symptom free. If you saw me on the street and spoke to me, you probably would not know that I had anything wrong.

However, there are clearly still issues in the head that I need to work through. My handwriting, short term memory and general writing ability being the top ones that are my concern at the moment. As you might’ve seen from the twitpics earlier this week, my handwriting has taken a bit of a nose dive, to the point that I get frustrated with myself when I’m trying to write by hand. I have since resorted to taking all my notes on a laptop to make sure that I am able to decipher my notes and actually remember what I was doing, rather than having to hire an Egyptologist to tell me what I’ve written.

As for the writing ability, I can write at my normal pace, but I have to pay extra care into what I write. Sometimes what I write is not what I was supposed to. I forget words from sentences and sometimes the structure of sentences is a little bit wrong. I’m not using the excuse that English is my second language and that would be the reason why, but these are mistakes that I wasn’t making prior to the head trauma.

My memory is still a bit all over the place. For example, I dunked my hand into a coffee cup full of hot coffee the other day as I thought that it was full of sweets. Who puts sweets in a coffee cup? I don’t know but I guess it made sense in my mind before burning my fingers and thinking “Hang on just one darn minute, these are not jelly beans.”

The other issues I still have relate mainly to self image, but this is not an emo diary so I’m not going to start writing about what pants I want to wear and how I want my hair to look and so on.

Suffice to say, I’ve taken significant steps in recovery, but there are still a lot of things that just don’t make sense and a lot of things I find I’m questioning. Whether it’s a personality change caused by the latest concussion and one that has accumulated from the four others I’ve had remains to be seen.

The awesome thing is that I was able to last a whole work out a few days ago. OK I wasn’t pressing nearly the same weights as before, but it felt good to give the body some abuse after laying in a dark room for a week and a bit.

If it was Christmas, I know what I’d want

If Christmas was around the corner, I’d know what I would want. I would like a couple of good days in a row. Yesterday I felt absolutely fine, on the top of the world and pretty much laughed at everything and to a degree I still do. However, I had a bad spell in the afternoon and I felt the same symptoms as I did on Sunday morning. I basically started to fade again, but I had a nap and that sort of fixed it.

 

You might’ve read about my dreams being weird, but this time I had no dreams what so ever. Infact I didn’t even know I had slept. Well I did but I didn’t really register it. I sort of felt like I was floating in a void instead of sleeping, so I didn’t really feel rested.

 

I had a good chat with my brother and he actually said, jokingly, that there is a silver lining in all this in that I have at least one good, happy, day mixed in. The running joke is that I’m usually upset my minor inconveniences and get full of rage-a-hol from it. It is kind of true. I appreciate his view on things and it made me laugh, so cheers bro.

 

I still continue to struggle with my short term memory and here’s an example of it. I clipped my fingernails this morning and once I had finished one hand, I went to do the other, only to stare at it puzzled as the nails had seemingly vanished. It took a good couple of minutes of convincing myself that I had done it.

 

I also found a guidance pamphlet the doctors gave me during my first visit. The crap thing is that it contained a list of symptoms for post-concussion syndrome and reading them I was slightly depressed to see that I’m displaying  18 out of 21 symptoms associated with the condition. I’m not going to use a jump to conclusions mat (see the movie Office Space for that reference), but see what the doctor says on Monday.

There’s one thing I’d still like to figure out from today though: WHY THE HELL DID I WAKE UP WITH THE OOMPA LOOMPA SONG STUCK IN MY HEAD THIS MORNING?

 

Edit: this took me 18 minutes to write. Getting better.

Seriously Sensitive But Best Day Yet

After I posted my blog last night, I took a turn for the worse. My headaches intensified to the point I was ready to do the 3m dash to the bathroom at any second. Good thing I didn’t have to as I probably would’ve knocked myself out on a door frame or something else. My headache was so intense that I wanted to perform trephination on myself to try and alleviate the pressure in my head. Luckily the painkillers finally started to work and I was able to get some sleep. I did sleep rather well, to the point that I was woken up only at 13:00 when a friendly Jehovah’s witness rang our doorbell.

I was also overcome with a feeling of sadness and I wanted to ball my eyes out last night. I have no idea where it all came from but my mood changed rather drastically and I wallowed most the night in a mix of intense headaches and self pity. I was a seriously sensitive dude last night Otherwise, today I have been feeling relatively fine. My head is clearer than it has been for days now and I don’t feel as if I was living in a cloud. However, I’m still not 100%. I don’t think I could last a full gym work out or a jog.

There are still issues I’m trying to work through. One thing I have noticed the past week is that I don’t really feel like myself. Where I am starting to feel better, I feel as if there’s a part of me that is missing. I guess the problem with concussions is that they are like breaking a vase. You can try and put it all back together, but depending how bad you broke it, you’ll never be able to fit all the pieces back together. And I guess the symptoms and the emotions are as unique as the person who suffers it.

However, this has been the best day so far, but that’s not to say that I’m OK. I hope from now on I’ll be able to make significant progress day by day. My dreams are still weird and for the past few nights they have had a mexican theme to them. Go figure that out.

I’m also seeing the doctor again on Monday, so hopefully I’ll get some more guidance into where I go from here. Tell you one thing though, once I get the all clear from the doctors, the first thing I’m going to do is have an ice cold beer.

Also, good luck to my teammates this weekend. I won’t be able to join them on the ice, but hopefully I can muster enough focus to make the trip and watch them play.

Body failing

It’s been another difficult week. I’ve had a spat of bad luck with things, mainly relating to my health. As it is well documented on my Twitter account and on this blog, I’ve got problems with my knee that I want to sort out and I’ll have an appointment for that on Tuesday, so expect another update then, latest.

So what went wrong this time? Apart from the knee, I had an allergic reaction to something Thursday-Friday night. I woke up with a severely swollen lip and from there, it quickly spread to my extremeties, mainly my right arm. Where I’d normally welcome the extra bulk, the swelling of my hand really had me worried. I don’t know what caused the reaction, but I reckon that it was a blister plaster that I wore on my right hand. I had been walking on crutches and had to carry my laptop home from work which caused my hand to rub on the crutches causing a blister.

So Friday, I spent catatonic, only spending a handful of hours awake. My wife said that it is what normally happens with an allergic reaction. Where I’m fine now, I feel extremely tired.

Additionally, I’ve been following the playoffs in the UK and mainly Isle of Wight. I had a tryout with the team arranged, but I had to cancel it due to being injured at the time. Now they are in the playoffs and I can’t help but think, ‘what if?’

I am increasingly worried, that with all the problems I have faced, I can’t work toward the goals I’ve set and outlined here. I am increasingly overcome with feelings of not being good enough, though looking through the rosters of the teams, I’ve played against some of the guys there and know that I’m more than capable of playing with them.

But my first priority is to get myself healthy. I have till September to get in shape so I have the time. I just have to hope that I can stay going till then.

Pain

It’s 23:34 GMT on the 31st of April. I’ve been trying to fall asleep for hours now but I keep writing in pain. Nothing seems to help. As the Verve said the drugs don’t work.

Could the 13th of April please hurry along.