Cleanup time...
Headache today. Headache for the past few days. I suspect it’s a combination of lack of sleep last night, bone-weary fatigue that reaches far beyond the past few days, being dizzy and having to hold my head in certain positions so I don’t fall over, and a variety of other stressors that are adding to my tension and tightness.
I haven’t been to see my chiropractor in several weeks. That might have something to do with it, too.
I also haven’t been exercising as much as I normally do. Something in me is rebelling. Just doesn’t want to do it. So, this is what I get – headache.
The interesting thing about this is that I have gone for at least a year without that nagging headache that was always with me, day in and day out, to the point where I didn’t even notice it anymore.
How can you not notice a headache? Well, if it’s always there with you, it just becomes part of your life — a part of your “new normal” that you sometimes end up having to accept and adapt to. I figured the headaches were just part of my “new normal” and I had to just live with them. Then I started exercising regularly. And I started going to a chiropractor. And I started practicing consciously relaxing. Who knows exactly why, but the headaches subsided, then completely went away.
And I had to adjust to yet another “new normal” where I wasn’t in constant pain anymore.
But something in me, I think, needs to push the envelope. And something in me needs to have some level of constant stress. I need it to keep me a little sharper than I am when I’m totally relaxed. I need it to keep me engaged. I need it to keep me feeling alive. This is a problem. Because logically I know that this is why I’ve gotten hurt a bunch of times — I’ve pushed myself when I should have taken it a little easier. I exceeded the limits of my capacity, and I fell. Or I got in an accident. Or I got knocked around. I tend to push it. So, I tend to get hurt.
I also tend to fight. I mean, really battle. I used to go after people — individuals who seemed like they were in my way. People I worked with, who I felt competitive with. People in my life, who I felt were making me feel less-than. People I encountered who had something I wanted, or who were what I wanted to be. I was always going after people, literally or figuratively, setting up competitive scenarios where I could either come out on top, or I could at the very least knock the other person down a bit. I wanted a fight. I wanted to fight. And there were plenty of people who obliged me. But too often, I’ve been a bit of a wuss and have either backed down or deflected someone’s counter-attack. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what’s happened, time and again.
Okay, so it’s embarrassing, but there it is. I’m human, after all.
But back to the war… and my PCS, which is what this feels like — a resurgence of post-concussion syndrome. The Mayo Clinic website says this about PCS :
Post-concussion symptoms, which vary, include:
Headaches
Dizziness
Fatigue
Irritability
Anxiety
Insomnia
Loss of concentration and memory
Noise and light sensitivity
Headaches that occur after a concussion can vary and may feel like tension-type headaches, cluster headaches or migraines. Most, however, are tension-type headaches, which may be due to a neck injury that happened at the same time as the head injury. In some cases, people experience behavior or emotional changes after a mild traumatic brain injury. Family members may notice that the person has become more irritable, suspicious, argumentative or stubborn.
That’s pretty much where I’m at right now.
- Headaches – a sick, migraine-y feeling behind my eyes, a thickness in the front of my head that feels like my skull is too small for my brain, and my brain is trying to get out through my eyes.
- Dizziness – wobbly and lightheaded, I have to keep my attention focused on ONE THING AT A TIME, or I feel like I’m going to fall over. And throw up.
- Fatigue – It’s so deep, it’s in my bones, pulling on me, dragging me down. I’m so tired, that I am having trouble sleeping.
- Irritability – Edgy at work, edgy at home, I have been having issues keeping my irritability under wraps.
- Anxiety – Yeah, that too. It’s a little embarrassing to admit — why does everything make me anxious — but it does. I’ve got this low-level anxiety that’s been crowding out intelligent thought for some time.
- Insomnia – Yeah, that too. Waking up at 3:30… 4:00 a.m., and not being able to get back to sleep. And having trouble falling asleep to begin with, now and then. It’s more about having trouble staying asleep than getting to sleep, but in any case, I can’t sleep nearly as well as I have been in the past.
- Loss of concentration and memory – Yeah, well, I’m getting by, I suppose. I’m trying to stay flexible and responsive to what the hell is going on around me, but I’m having real challenges remembering some things. I try not to let it get to me, because that makes a difficult situation even harder. But it’s a real pain in my ass, these days. I’ve done pretty well with accepting that I can’t remember some things, so I have to ask again and again and again, and ignore the strange looks that people are giving me.
- Noise and light sensitivity – Makes staying asleep hard, if I don’t have my earplugs in. ‘Cause I’m so sensitive to sound, that if I hear something off in the distance when I’m half-asleep, it sounds like it’s right there in the room with me, and it wakes me up.
So, the war is back again. And I say that with both a humility towards the veterans and soldiers who have served in actual wars, knowing that the “war” I am fighting pales in comparison to what they have gone through overseas… and I also say it with the sense that no matter what your experience in actual combat, there is an element after TBI that is war-like.
My neuropsych hates it when I talk about battling through things. They want me to think about my experience in terms of a dance or a game. They don’t want me to get so hung up on things, and to ease up on the intensity in my life. I get that. It’s not such a great thing for me to be so god-awful tweaked about every little thing. And I understand they want me to keep the agitation levels down as much as humanly possible. They want me to manage my situation with forethought and insight and mindfulness. They want me to approach my situation like a dance. Better yet, as a game.
Certainly you can think about it in other terms, like it’s a dance or it’s a game, but in my experience, it’s more like a battle. Because this is not some game that has no consequence. This is my life. My survival is at stake. In a dance or a game, you can always walk away from the situation and get back to normal. But with my situation, I AM the situation. And I can’t just walk away from myself and find some more normal way to be.
And in a dance or a game, you don’t acquire post-traumatic stress and have horrible, terrible biochemical consequences of your “adventures”. You don’t have that constant cascade of fight-flight stress chemicals marinating you from the inside-out. You don’t have that repeated surprise(!) experience of having things turn out completely differently than you expected/planned — without having any idea why that happened. You don’t feel like you’ve lost yourself — sometimes the most important parts of yourself — and you have no idea how to get them back. You don’t feel like you’re cut off from the parts of you that once mattered so much.
Treating the challenges of life like a dance or a game may be fine for some (and some days it seems that way) , but it’s just not my experience, and my experience speaks louder than words.
It has been a battle. On and off. It has been a struggle at times. It has not been easy. Sometimes things have come together, but many times they have not and I have had to make do after the fact — scramble to sort out my snafu’s and fubar situations. Scramble I do — I sure know how to do that! And I can usually come out on the up-side. But then comes the post-traumatic stress. Even if the outcome is good, there can still be post-traumatic stress, when you’re hopped up on all the excitement, and the excitement seems to connect directly to your survival.
Excitation cascade to stress
Good stress, bad stress… it’s still a stress on your system, no matter how positive the outcome is.
And when you perceive the action to be directly related to your survival, and it feels like your life is in danger (perhaps because you’re going to lose your house if you don’t get this right so you can keep your job), it is no dance, and it is no game. It feels bigger and badder than that. And you get traumatic stress. Plenty of it.
Which introduces a whole host of problems — which I have found can be most “tolerable” when I am adding more stress to my situation. When I don’t have enough downtime to get my balance back (literally), I can end up making things even worse, on down the line. Because I crave the soothing effects of stress hormones, adrenaline, and those complexity-dampening chemicals that make everything in my life seem more simple, more basic, less complicated and confusing.
I know I’m not the only one. And I really believe this is a big reason why people are “compelled to repeat” their choices that put them in bad situations. Because they may not have the time or the resources to sit down and take a breath and sort things through and make sense of all of them. So, they jump head-first into more stress, without even realizing what they are doing. And they put themselves back in situations that traumatized them to begin with — bad relationships, bad jobs, redeployment, crime, etc.
Sensitivities can go through the roof, when your brain has been injured. Welcome to the party! The one way you can take the edge off, is by going extreme — extreme sports, extreme fun, extreme danger, extreme jobs… that’ll settle you down and focus you in.
The only problem is, you eventually have to come out of those woods, and you eventually have to go about your life again.
Which is when the PCS sets in. The headaches, the dizziness, the irritability, the sensitivities. It makes me crazy, and I feel like I’m back to where I started, several years ago. And it seems like the only thing that can take the edge off, is plunging back into the types of situations that caused the trauma to begin with.
I can’t tell you how tempted I am, to dive back into another massive project at work, and just lose myself in that.
Cleanup time...
Headache today. Headache for the past few days. I suspect it’s a combination of lack of sleep last night, bone-weary fatigue that reaches far beyond the past few days, being dizzy and having to hold my head in certain positions so I don’t fall over, and a variety of other stressors that are adding to my tension and tightness.
I haven’t been to see my chiropractor in several weeks. That might have something to do with it, too.
I also haven’t been exercising as much as I normally do. Something in me is rebelling. Just doesn’t want to do it. So, this is what I get – headache.
The interesting thing about this is that I have gone for at least a year without that nagging headache that was always with me, day in and day out, to the point where I didn’t even notice it anymore.
How can you not notice a headache? Well, if it’s always there with you, it just becomes part of your life — a part of your “new normal” that you sometimes end up having to accept and adapt to. I figured the headaches were just part of my “new normal” and I had to just live with them. Then I started exercising regularly. And I started going to a chiropractor. And I started practicing consciously relaxing. Who knows exactly why, but the headaches subsided, then completely went away.
And I had to adjust to yet another “new normal” where I wasn’t in constant pain anymore.
But something in me, I think, needs to push the envelope. And something in me needs to have some level of constant stress. I need it to keep me a little sharper than I am when I’m totally relaxed. I need it to keep me engaged. I need it to keep me feeling alive. This is a problem. Because logically I know that this is why I’ve gotten hurt a bunch of times — I’ve pushed myself when I should have taken it a little easier. I exceeded the limits of my capacity, and I fell. Or I got in an accident. Or I got knocked around. I tend to push it. So, I tend to get hurt.
I also tend to fight. I mean, really battle. I used to go after people — individuals who seemed like they were in my way. People I worked with, who I felt competitive with. People in my life, who I felt were making me feel less-than. People I encountered who had something I wanted, or who were what I wanted to be. I was always going after people, literally or figuratively, setting up competitive scenarios where I could either come out on top, or I could at the very least knock the other person down a bit. I wanted a fight. I wanted to fight. And there were plenty of people who obliged me. But too often, I’ve been a bit of a wuss and have either backed down or deflected someone’s counter-attack. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what’s happened, time and again.
Okay, so it’s embarrassing, but there it is. I’m human, after all.
But back to the war… and my PCS, which is what this feels like — a resurgence of post-concussion syndrome. The Mayo Clinic website says this about PCS :
Post-concussion symptoms, which vary, include:That’s pretty much where I’m at right now.
So, the war is back again. And I say that with both a humility towards the veterans and soldiers who have served in actual wars, knowing that the “war” I am fighting pales in comparison to what they have gone through overseas… and I also say it with the sense that no matter what your experience in actual combat, there is an element after TBI that is war-like.
My neuropsych hates it when I talk about battling through things. They want me to think about my experience in terms of a dance or a game. They don’t want me to get so hung up on things, and to ease up on the intensity in my life. I get that. It’s not such a great thing for me to be so god-awful tweaked about every little thing. And I understand they want me to keep the agitation levels down as much as humanly possible. They want me to manage my situation with forethought and insight and mindfulness. They want me to approach my situation like a dance. Better yet, as a game.
Certainly you can think about it in other terms, like it’s a dance or it’s a game, but in my experience, it’s more like a battle. Because this is not some game that has no consequence. This is my life. My survival is at stake. In a dance or a game, you can always walk away from the situation and get back to normal. But with my situation, I AM the situation. And I can’t just walk away from myself and find some more normal way to be.
And in a dance or a game, you don’t acquire post-traumatic stress and have horrible, terrible biochemical consequences of your “adventures”. You don’t have that constant cascade of fight-flight stress chemicals marinating you from the inside-out. You don’t have that repeated surprise(!) experience of having things turn out completely differently than you expected/planned — without having any idea why that happened. You don’t feel like you’ve lost yourself — sometimes the most important parts of yourself — and you have no idea how to get them back. You don’t feel like you’re cut off from the parts of you that once mattered so much.
Treating the challenges of life like a dance or a game may be fine for some (and some days it seems that way) , but it’s just not my experience, and my experience speaks louder than words.
It has been a battle. On and off. It has been a struggle at times. It has not been easy. Sometimes things have come together, but many times they have not and I have had to make do after the fact — scramble to sort out my snafu’s and fubar situations. Scramble I do — I sure know how to do that! And I can usually come out on the up-side. But then comes the post-traumatic stress. Even if the outcome is good, there can still be post-traumatic stress, when you’re hopped up on all the excitement, and the excitement seems to connect directly to your survival.
Excitation cascade to stress