Lost Inside My Head

Lost Inside My Head

By John Hoyt What a difference a few seconds can make. I fell two and a half stories off my roof and hit the crown of my head on a six foot 4x4 wooden post and then landed on a steel “T” post just under my right jaw which broke the jaw, two teeth, fractured the voice box and three vertebrae in my neck and stopped just a micro millimeter short of cutting the secondary vein to my brain, but I still threw a blood clot which caused a mini stroke. That was October 31, 2000. Now I am 100% disabled with a TBI. The strange thing was that after the fall my family knew that something was wrong but the doc’s and everyone else were focusing on the facial and vertebrae damage and not on the brain itself. Consequently it took five years before I started to get some help and only after finding communityworks, inc. by default. The saddest part of all this is that I lost my thirty year marriage and strained or damaged all the relationships and foundations of my life taking all the blame for being lost in my head, never knowing it was a brain injury which was at the core of my problems. Now is a better world and life than then. Healing is a better direction than lost. Future is a direction I can live with instead of dreading; a peaceful mind and life is a reality I can live with instead of the mental and behavioral chaos that I endured for too many years. What the support system which I now have in place has provided is first and foremost is confirmation that I can find and achieve the right direction. In short, as I battle the day to day frustrations and setbacks, it is the positive guidance I receive which quite frankly, on my worst days, keeps me going. As I move towards achieving the goals which I have set for myself— some lofty, some mundane, it is this support system which helps me maintain the balance and yes, minimizes the discouragement. Am I still lost inside my head? At times. The short term memory loss is still the most frustrating, but I am grateful that the long term memory is sharper than ever. Simply put. There’s hope after TB