Brain Damage: A True Story

Brain Damage: A True Story Carrington M. Nye

Brain Damage: A True Story

A car accident. The sound of brakes being pressed down too hard too fast; the skidding of tires, the crash of metal on metal, windows shattering. Screams. And then the blackness. Becoming aware slowly I am sitting in a hard plastic chair, where on earth am I? What has happened? Voices and people, phones ringing, everyone moving about busily as I sit in my chair not knowing what is going on or where I am. A girl sitting next to me she is talking to me, but I cannot place her; do I know her? What?, its all I can manage. My head is throbbing and my face feels so weird; stiff and sore. I said welcome back are you okay? A disembodied voice said. Where are we? What happened? In my scattered brain her face comes into focus and I realize that I do know her; I work with her at the store. What is her name? Why should we be together in this strange place? We were in an accident, silly. Dont you remember? We were going to look at that trailer for rent and somebody shot over the hill and hit us; he mustve been doing 90 miles-per-hour! Gosh, are you okay, you look like youre about to pass out. Nurse? Can someone please come over here and look at her? Christy. Her name is Christy and she works back in lay-a-way. We are not really friends. Why on earth would I be going somewhere with her to look at a place for rent? I am confused beyond belief and it feels like someone has taken a power driver to my head!

Brain Damage: A True Story

A woman in my face, bending down and looking into my eyes. A man shining a light into my eyes, my hands finding my face and I want to cry everything hurts. My hair hurts. What is wrong with me? Can someone please help me? Then the questions Who are you? What is your name? What day is it? I wince, I shake my head. I dont know! Someone please help me! Christy? I look to her to help me, the tears pooling in my eyes, and she understands my unspoken message she takes my left hand into hers and she is so gentle and sweet. But her hands are icy. Her name is Annie White and she lives in Powell Thats right. I am Annie White. I do live in Powell. I think. I did live in Powell, didnt I? With my brother and his wife and their kids? I cannot seem to connect all the dots, but I know that I did live with my brother, and had for a year or so, and I had recently moved back there after? I cannot think straight! Can you call my brother there? The woman is back and she is asking me for his name, but I just dont know it what is his name? I know his name I must, he is my brother. Minutes pass by and all I can do is hold my head in my hands and rock back and forth crying. I dont know! What is the matter with me? Mitch, Mitch White. Was that my voice? Was I finally speaking I think it was me and my voice was so low that the woman was leaning in my face again asking me to repeat the name Mitch White I say again. He has an unlisted number I tell her. She just smiles and pats my hands. We have ways around those dear, she tells me. Time has no meaning for me, I look around and Christy is no longer there, she has vanished. The people there are too busy to take any notice of me, so I just sit there. Alone. Alone in my torment and pain, alone with fractured thoughts flitting through my mind. I cannot concentrate on any single line of inquiry, as soon as I think I have a

Brain Damage: A True Story

cognate thought, it is gone, gone so fast I am not really sure that I was forming a real thought or not. Then suddenly my brother is there. He is standing across from me, his wife and young pre-teen daughter beside him. He is speaking to the woman who can get unlisted numbers, and in the next moment he is helping me to my feet, his wife taking my arm and leading me outside to their waiting car. The ride home is strange. Only broken pieces remain in my memory, but I seem to recall quite clearly speaking in earnest to my niece, who shares the backseat with me, telling her my thoughts on God knows what, but remembering the shocked horror of her face as she continuously scoots as far into her side of the car as possible, as if I might reach out and harm her in some way. What kind of monster was I to scare this child so? What words were leaving my mouth and why oh why couldnt I just shut up? I know that we stopped at a drug store to fill a prescription. Only Melinda, my brothers wife, went inside. I was left babbling away in that horrified manner to all that would listen until Mitch told me simply to shut up. That seemed to have helped me in some small way, but then all of those jumbled and fragmented thoughts, were all in my brain, tearing up my head and making it throb even worse. I would find out days later that on that ride home from the hospital that I had nearly traumatized my young niece. That my cursing had caused her young eyes to widen in horror and that the subject matter I chose to speak of was not fit for most adult ears let alone those of a budding twelve-year old girl. Guilt. I felt it tremendously every time that I dared to think what I might have imparted to the girl I thought of as my little sister, Denise. Someone that I had played games with tried to teach about fashion and music, and who I would sit up late at night

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with in our shared room talking about her feelings, young and confused, as I tried to help her deal with the changes that were occurring in her life. That I had in any way damaged my relationship with my kid sister was horrifying to me. What had I said? I would never know. We did not speak of that ill-fated car ride ever again. Not once. I was 23 years old and my big brother and I had just recently lost our father to cancer. He had been our only living parent, with our mother passing on more than a decade before when I was only five and he had been my own age now. I had been living in an apartment with an ill-fated boyfriend who, lets face it, was a terrible mistake. I moved back in with Mitch after Daddy died. It seemed that I went over there to grieve with my brother and just never left. I simply moved right back into the bedroom that I had shared with Denise and things were back to normal. But the family needed their space, and my big brother Mitch and I were finally on one anothers nerves enough for me to seek my own place to live. Even on my meager income from the big chain store that I worked at, I had been determined to make a go of it and I had apparently asked Christy if she would like to be my roommate. Christy was a good girl. A bit too Country, but I thought we would most likely get along great. Too bad about the car accident, because we both shied away from the idea after that, thinking some kind of Omen had intervened. We Southerners were funny that way. Fate had said in his loud voice No and we obeyed. Back at work within a week, I still did not feel myself. Where I had usually had only a sunny disposition with a ready smile for everyone previously, I was now melancholy and remote. I was sent home from the hospital with a concussion, but something far worse was now the matter with me. I knew it deep down and no amount of

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Codeine was going to cure whatever it was that was now so wrong with me. What really made me so infuriatingly angry (and remains to do so to this day) was the fact that while inside that Emergency Room, I guess because there was no physical damage that had to be seen to, I had been sitting in a hard plastic chair in the hallway across from the nurses station instead of regaled to an actual examination room where a Doctor who was not too busy dealing with real injuries might have taken the time to diagnose my invisible injuries more accurately. One girl went into that car and another one came out that there was now a broken connection somewhere in my brain I had no doubt. Why on earth had no doctor properly examined me when I was brought into the ER? My memory for three solid days had been wiped completely out of my head, yet I was sent home with a prescription for a very low-level pain medication and a pat on the shoulder. Partial amnesia may not be lifethreatening, but it is no sunny walk in the park either. And I was vastly different now. The smiles were not so easy in coming the laughs especially more difficult to arouse. I was darker somehow; more reserved, and at the same time completely unable to control the harsh words that came out of my mouth. I was quick to criticize, quick to judge, and quick to cut down. I had no earthly idea how such a phenomenon could possibly occur. Then one day years and years later it dawned on me, like the proverbial light bulb above my head turning on: I was braindamaged! What had been a horrible car accident had become a life-changing experience for me. I was an almost stranger to myself and to those that had known me my entire life, family and friends alike, at the age of 23. I had been re-born then and there and I would

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never be the same person again. Not if I wished hard enough, not if I prayed hard enough, and not if I had wanted it more than anything else in all the world, the fact would forever remain that I was now different. Guess what else? I have no power over the words that come out of my mouth at least not all of the time. I feel like a person with a case of mild Turrets Syndrome, where I might just say well anything! I also went from being a bashful young lady to being brash and very social-able. I love talking to people, strangers especially fascinate me for some reason, and I am interested in every aspect of a persons life. I am truly fascinated by those people around me in life that I have never even laid eyes on previously and never before in my life was I like that! I could never have walked up to someone at a ball game or school function and just starting chatting them up out of the blue, but I do it all of the time now! In restaurants, at my kids little league games, at their school, while shopping anytime is a good time to meet someone new and speak to them, to find out all about them. And I cannot for the life of me explain why this is except to state that I was perfectly normal before that fateful day 15 years ago. If normal was trying hard not to be noticed too much, to sit in the back of the class and hope like hell the teacher never called my name, if it meant that I just wanted to be liked but not overly popular, then I was normal. Frontal Lobe Injury complications is the medical terminology for what I am currently and will forever suffer from thanks to a high speed encounter with another vehicle. While Christys car was virtually sitting still, making a low-speed left-hand turn, the driver of the car that hit us (on my side of the car) was doing in excess of 80mph. I

Brain Damage: A True Story

learned of these facts much later as well. The impact occurred in the dip of a pretty steep grade, so that the driver who hit us was at least partially air-borne as well. I can only recall a very fragmented second or so right before impact occurred the entire day or two before and for at least three days after the impact are an almost total loss, with flashes of memory coming in and going out, much like watching a movie where someone fast forwards or rewinds and watches little snippets and then shuts the television off altogether. Yet I was dismissed from the hospital without even a brain scan or any other formal test, as far as I can recall and was told by my family later. But not a single aspect of my life has been the same since that time my tastes, my favorite music, my ability to learn, and most of all my entire personality. It was if I had literally died and someone else had stepped into my body that day, and although I have learned to love myself now, I wonder about the woman that was forever lost: was she nicer than me, kinder, more ambitious, not as lazy, not as boisterous, did she love the color red like me or did she prefer green? It seems that when I attempt to recall my youth and childhood, I can only recall still-movie-like clips of another persons life and that makes me sad. There will be what-ifs in every life what if I had chosen to walk instead of drive, what if I had said yes when he asked me out instead of opting to study, what if I had never put an application in at this dead-end job? But my question will forever be: What if the real me had survived that day? Who would I be today instead? We will never know.

Carrington M. Nye Aka: Annie White

Brain Damage: A True Story

Brain Damage information retrieved from: http://www.allabouttbi.com/partsofthebrain/