Hubby asked if I was okay to keep walking along the beach after helping me up but I was only a couple of metres further on when I realised that this was not going to be okay. I felt decidedly wobbly, shocked and my fingers were really bleeding now.
As we headed up to the room I remember not feeling overly safe climbing the flight of stairs we had to ascend to get there. Once in the room I seemed to get some of my wits back about me - I cleaned up my hand and the scrapes on my face, got Voltaren onto my knuckles and carefully onto the swelling parts of my face and began to wash out the shirt I had had on. That was when I realised I needed to add the anti-inflammatory application to my shoulder as well - the green algae from the rocks was also smeared right down the left shoulder of my shirt. After cleaning myself up and changing out of my wet clothes we decided to book our safari trip, get some ice and coldpack my bruises then catch the next bus into town to get antiseptic to keep any infection at bay.
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| The day after - not looking 'with it' at all! I did feel better by the end of our week away. |
The flight home was also not a problem apart from the descent where I thought my ear drums were going to explode thanks to the sinus cold I had developed while we were away. Then I tried to return to work...
By the end of the weekend before school went back, about a week and a half after the fall and having completed the planning for and facilitated a workshop for teachers on the Thursday and Friday, I was starting to just put my head down and sleep. At any time of the day and more than once or twice a day. I have not been a great sleeper for a number of years but suddenly I was sleeping for 12 hours without any problem whatsoever on top of these nana naps. I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever known before.
Travelling between Whanganui and Mangaweka on Monday, working for a half day there, and then on to Ohakune saw me unable to continue working - sleep was all I wanted. By this stage I was also beginning to have a constant head ache, my neck was aching and I was feeling sick all the time. If I didn't know it would be a miracle I might have thought I was pregnant again.
Tuesday was no better - the nausea so bad that I could not cope with hubby driving a 360 degree turn in an empty carpark nor the winding road to and from the school I was working in - only about 45 minutes of that each way. As we headed for Taihape on our trip out I shut my eyes and hoped to hold onto what little I had eaten that day. This along with the cognition issues sent me back to the doctor the next day. I was put off work for two weeks at that stage - concussion. Little did I know that two weeks was never going to cut it in this recovery.
Over the month that followed I experienced dizzy spells if I got up too fast, turned too quickly or just turned my head too far to either side. The nausea was at its worst when I was in the car and at night going from vertical to horizontal. My poor husband moving in bed - even his foot - would have me feeling like the room was spinning. A sensation I hated after a big night, never mind now when there was no alcohol being consumed. I worked out it was easier to stay up for an hour or so after he went to bed as he stilled his body movements and I only had to contend with the initial change in position as I lay down. I began to notice that when I was walking I would drift to the right particularly if I was walking beside someone else. Being a passenger in the car meant constant motion sickness. I either had to close my eyes until we got where we were going or look at the sky. The sky had the smallest amount of change - white lines rush at you, cars going in different directions are a mind freak - although if we followed a car I could just watch the back of that. Racing around corners in the car was not great nor was going around sweeping bends that were on a downhill slope - eyes open or shut. Being in a busy restaurant or just the supermarket would make me feel sick - visual overload. It stopped about a month and a half after my initial symptoms onset, once I had had a couple of sessions with the concussion physio who manipulated my head, tipped backwards, to move the crystals in my ear. The end was nigh for the vestibular issues I was having.
I tried to use the extra time at home to get a bit of a start made on my Specialist Teaching paper only to find I could not concentrate for more than about 20 minutes before my head was pounding, my eyes were dry and my vision blurred. I then had to sleep. I found I would hit the wrong keys on the keyboard - something so ingrained that it is habit where to find them and to type accurately. If I did hit the right keys my brain would reverse the order of letters - like became liek. Writing was no better as my brain struggled to work my hand well enough to write as neatly and as accurately as I had done before. My spelling was atrocious. So much for that idea. Rest it was to be then.
One night about a week later I had been to a couple of appointments and the house was busy with people heading in all directions. I decided I could cook dinner - a simple one-pan mince and pasta dish that, before that night, I would have said I could cook in my sleep. Turns out I could but with the busy day I had had, not pacing myself - something I learned about later - I sat down to eat feeling both sick and with my hands physically shaking. I also had stabbing pains at the site of the bang. It took about half an hour for this to pass. I had over exerted myself with less than a tenth of my normal daily load. I was physically and mentally exhausted. For the first month I would lie on the couch and sleep after dinner for between half an hour and an hour, whether or not I had cooked dinner. Why? The exertion of the day, which was pretty pathetic by my usual standards, the lights being on over the table, and the social interaction of our dinnertime catch ups. More on the struggle to cope with social aspects of life after a head trauma are coming in my next post.
Light sensitivity and noise sensitivity were the two most unexpected physical side effects to hit me. I have worked with and been fascinated by Sensory Processing Disorder since I became an RTLB. Little did I know that the head bang was going to give me insider experience of what our students are dealing with. I cannot have bright, artificial lights glaring in front of me - and that includes car head lights. If I do my head aches, the muscles around my eyes begin to ache and I become irritated and angry. Noise for any length of time will do the same thing - the pitch of videos played through a cell phone, music thumping in the background, lots of people talking, guitar music on Discovery Turbo which was already a trigger for annoyance over time became an instant annoyance, whining American accents on reality shows or in some comedies all became painful. Think fingernails on the blackboard and multiply that by 100.
Eventually the sleep took a bit of a swing - if I had slept during the day there was no way I could get to sleep at night. Either I would get a head ache as I lay down, often at the site of the impact, or I would wake in the middle of the night with a head ache. Not long before this began to happen I had stumbled across the local library lending of audiobooks. I would sit up on the couch in the dark and listen to someone read me a story while the Panadol did its thing, then take myself back to bed.
These experiences started me wondering about whether students I had taught who would complain of tiredness, or need to leave the room because it was too noisy or requested the lights in the room be left off (those flickering fluorescent lights are definitely the worst of the artificial lights) were actually doing so because they were reading signals in themselves that I was now experiencing. How many students had I taught were hiding head injuries suffered at the hands of those around them and needed me to be aware that they could not focus without brain breaks? I know some of my brain breaks are spent staring out the window at a tree blowing in the wind, or watching tuis sitting in the kowhai filling themselves to gorging point with nectar. IF that were me in a classroom I would have been refocused and told to stop day dreaming. How many of those same students are suffering head aches in silence? How many parents chose not to bother me about what seemed small to them but for their child was absolutely massive when it came to draining their energy levels?
The physical effects of my head injury have knocked me around as much,if not more, than the cognitive, social and emotional effects have. It is great to talk to others who have been there and understand the absolute and utter exhaustion that comes with even the most simple tasks, the need to rest not once but several times a day, the pain in the most unlikely places - neck, shoulders and lower back all ache with the exertion of writing this post now. To look at me I look fine, like I could go for hours, but actually it really is the tip of the iceberg and most days I feel like Titanic - it sinks me within two hours.
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