Some physical aspects to brain damage: Getting Directions

And then there’s the body … While the focus of ‘Getting Directions’ is the brain, emotions, feelings and what-have-you, of course there’s the question of how your body is too. And, in particular, how your body is after your brain’s been damaged or is for any other reason not what it used to be.

This is my summary of how my body is treating me these days.

My basic motor abilities will be a bit ragged sometimes. I can be very clumsy, bump into things and so on. And I bruise easily – so I can look a little surprising! But, thankfully, the bruises rarely hurt.
Quite a while after I’d come out of hospital, my sense of taste went completely haywire. Whatever I ate – and I mean whatever – tasted off. The cow could be milked right in front of me, but milk from her would still taste terrible. All I could do was trust my partner that the problem was my sense of taste, not what I was eating and drinking. Fortunately, normality resumed after two or three weeks.
My temperature control is all over the show. I’m often colder than I would have been once. But, mainly at night, I also frequently struggle with incredibly hot and dry feet. (This has been the case post-crash. I’m told a nurse in hospital said they’re worse than the Gobi Desert.)
And talking of sleep, my sleep patterns were disrupted by the crash and have never really recovered. I’m told that once I was in rehab they were giving me the strongest knock-out drugs they could, to no effect. I’m not quite that bad now, but I’m a night-owl and I have to be – I just lie awake if I go to bed before midnight.
Even with going to bed late, I’ll often wake up in the night and be properly awake. But as I read a while back, the whole idea of ‘eight hours sleep’ being the norm is an invention of the industrial revolution, when factory owners and their ilk needed a rested work force. In other (and earlier) contexts, being awake in the night and reading, playing board games and similar engaging but not over-stimulating past-times was once the norm. And it is the approach I normally take. In short, what I’ve learned is that if you’re awake, don’t think of it as a problem and don’t fight it. Get up for a while; do something relaxing. It’s not a problem.

So, while that’s a summary of how my body is, overall, I can’t be bothered to think much about the physical consequences of my brain being injured. I’ve just lumped it all under the ‘it’s just the way it is’ heading. And the ‘if this is as bad as it gets, I’ve nothing much to complain about’ heading, too. (Which is a relief that’s worth keeping in mind.)

My partner found not being forewarned of the likely consequences of brain injury frustrating. That’s understandable but I don’t know if it is realistic to expect that from the medics. I don’t know whether all the likely consequences are pretty common, or whether they vary hugely from individual to individual. If the former, they could be the sort of things that the professionals just take for granted because they’ve seen it all before and thus never think to mention. And if they vary hugely then, obviously, no useful forewarning is feasible.

And the other variable is how common the injury is that’s led to the changed behaviour. In my case, we learned later that, right up until very recently, people died from damage such as I’d sustained. Thus, there was no case history. (Indeed, I can remember the last specialist consultant I saw, in the months after I’d been allowed home, being very surprised at how well I was in the flesh, as it were, in comparison to what he’d expected from reading my case history.)

But, whatever, I think the best approach has to be to ask about and talk about what’s going on with your body as well as your brain. That’s the lesson from my experience: talk about it all. For the brain-injured and those with otherwise failing brains, and for anyone caring for them, it’s all going to be new. For the professionals, it helps keep the reality being experienced by the patient in focus.

A glass of fresh milk - which brain damage can leave you thinking it’s sour

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