TBI Healing Art

Being content about my brain injury means that I don’t make the effort to better myself. Most of the time I don’t notice any improvement with my health. I always wonder if the work I do is helpful. It seems I’m going around in circles, repeating the same routine without any progress.
 

Over time it’s easy for me to concede to the complications from my brain injury and become content with the soreness from the injury. The ability to think, speak, walk and so forth is replaced by other priorities of life. This is when I doubt I’ve done enough to recover from my brain injury and continue my efforts at healing. For me the need to recover from the TBI swings back and forth like a pendulum.
 
My days are often filled with fatigue from yesterdays activities, soreness from nerve damage and or dizziness from not enough sleep. It becomes difficult to maintain any routine so I can reach my goals.
 
Falling short of my goals can be caused by not understanding the needs to finish the goal and or poor judgement, both cognitive skills that have been damaged in my brain injury.

Concentration is the ability to focus on one thought while at the same time excluding unrelated thoughts, feelings or distractions. Concentration is one of many cognitive skills. (Read about cognitive problems after a TBI.) I feel that my diminished ability to concentrate affects everything I do more than other cognitive skills.

 

Concentration is closely related to the fatigue problems I struggle with. The more I concentrate my fatigue increases and concentration decreases.
When I pay attention to what other people are saying, I need to shut-out sounds and noises which also requires concentration and adds to the fatigue. One of the results of my brain injury is the distracting tinging sensation I feel in my thighs. I don’t know what explains the soreness, perhaps damage to the nerves or the brain stem. The point is it affects my concentration since I need to consistently block-out the soreness.
 
Other physical difficulties which require concentration are walking, balance and co-ordination. I can walk but I need to think about how I plant my foot and balance my weight. I believe a three year old has more agility than I do.
When I go on my walking exercises I need to look down, the ground doesn’t distract my concentration by moving or talking to me. Yes visual motion and audio sounds are a distractions when I concentrate.
 
Cognitive skills require concentration as well. I have difficulty finishing projects, retaining information and I’m slow at understanding. Creating this website/blog is an example of my cognitive struggles.
 
I know HTML and CSS (both are code for making websites), however WordPress (software for making blogs) was new to me. My difficulty was understanding WordPress and integrating it with the code that I knew. I couldn’t afford to pay someone to make the website and I couldn’t take a class and learn it; too much information is presented too quickly and I become overwhelmed. So I printed tutorials from the internet, some I understood, but many I didn’t. I needed to read them several times since I have trouble retaining information. While making the website/blog, the information would become too large for me to grasp what I have done and I would need to repeat what I did so I could understood.
 
In the end it took me three years to complete including two six months breaks from working. I’m grateful this project was meaningful to me and I have patience. There have been other projects which I’ve abandoned since my injury.

Sleep is essential for memory, learning, concentration and judgement (the skills I lost in my injury) among other things. (Read about sleep, learning and memory.)
Sleeping difficulties are common with traumatic brain injury survivors. (Read about sleep and TBI.)

 

People with a traumatic brain injury have problems with concentration and other cognitive abilities. (Read about TBI cognitive problems.) Research shows that cognition will improve while sleep improves and vise versa. (Read about improved sleep and brain injuries.)
 
Before my brain injury I would be active during the day, sleep for about six or seven hours and be rested for another day.
Since my brain injury, I sleep at night for about nine hours then volunteer, exercise or work on this blog until the afternoon when I sleep for a couple more hours. I need about eleven hours of sleep each day to stay alert and concentrate.
The point I’m trying to make is that I need more sleep to accomplish less. My energy is depleted quickly.
 
Simple things like walking, listening, talking and thinking can tire me out quickly and I become fatigued.
I need to limit my activity or spasticity becomes a problem. (I loose my stability and stumble.)
When I’m tired the volume and/ or pitch of a sound can become intolerable, I often wear earplugs to reduce the distraction and reserve my concentration, if that doesn’t work I need to leave the room or walk away.
When I’m tired, mostly in the evening, I may have difficulty speaking the words I’m thinking.
My thoughts take longer to form when I’m tired. I’m easily distracted since my concentration is depleted.
It’s all related, the sleep, fatigue and concentration.

Reading helps me concentrate. There are studies that say it improves memory as well. (Read about reading for your brain and memory.)
I’m fortunate that my vision was not damaged when I acquired my brain injury and prevent me from reading like some people. (More about reading problems after a TBI.) While sleep improves my fatigue which allows me to concentrate longer, reading improves my attention so that I can better focus on what I’m doing.
 

I needed to start small with everything I did, reading is no exception. I began with the newspaper comics. Before my brain injury I enjoyed reading the comics while eating breakfast and relaxing before the day began. This was something I could still do; with all the activities I could no longer participate in, the simple things I could do became treasured more. After the comics, I’d read small newspaper articles for a few minutes until I became tired. I enjoy reading since nobody knows the difficulty I have with pronunciation, understanding or how slow I read, besides, I can always re-read if needed.
 
I feel that I’m learning and improving myself. I have a perception that people and maybe even myself have no expectation of me, that I won’t amount to anything. Damn that’s painful. I want to prove these people wrong. Another advantage of reading is that it doesn’t require any physical activity, I can rest my legs on the couch or bed. However I do become mentally fatigued.

Eventually, I started reading the books I read in high school and then classic novels. I can’t retain the details, but I can remember overall story.

I’ve tried reading text books, but I become overloaded with information and after reading a few pages, there are too many things to remember, I have no more concentration and I needed to sleep.

Reading the stories of fictional characters was the incentive for creating this blog. My thought was that I have something to share that might benefit other people and I would benefit from making the blog.

Learning with a Traumatic Brain Injury will be determined by the severity of the injury along with the desire and effort to learn. They seem to be a contradiction since the cognitive skills used for learning (attention, memory, understanding, etc.) are the same that become damaged during a brain injury. (Read about the cognitive difficulties TBI survivors face.)
 
With regards to my injury, no one knew the recovery I would make, no one told me what I could or could not achieve and I have poor awareness of my abilities. These conditions lead me to believe I could regain my health again and return to my prior activities. This conclusion was wrong and guided me through a great amount of frustration. I’m thankful for my lack of awareness if I have the thought I’ll accomplish something.
 
Learning is wearisome with a brain injury. I soon become tired, my brain has less capacity for concentration, my thoughts are slower and the right side of my body stiffens when I tire. The one thing I can do is sit in a chair, look at a computer screen and ponder what to design for a couple of hours. I need a quiet room and earplugs with few interruptions if I want concentrate.
 
Soon After my injury I created the “Healing Images” shown on this website. I made them because I didn’t want to be denied doing an activity I enjoyed when I’ve been refused many other activities since my injury. I also wanted some understanding of what happened. Without knowing it I was doing art therapy, helping me deal with the injury emotionally and mentally.
 
I needed to read books about design principles, understand it and decide how to apply it. In short I was re-learning what I knew before the injury. It went slow, it took me approximately five years to finish making the images.
I believe that keeping busy thinking and doing what you enjoy will greatly benefit the healing process.
After remembering how to work with photoshop software I tried to re-learn other computer graphic software and HTML.
 
The struggle of understanding what I read and the judgement of my decisions I learn through trial and error. It takes me a half dozen or more tries to understand what I need to do and get the results I want. Everything is a learning moment.
Often I give-up at trying to solve a problem since I don’t understand why I can’t get the results I want. What keeps me going is the small steps of improvement, seeing my vision and the wish to do things right. There are projects with less meaning that I’ve abandoned. I’m grateful for the people who share their knowledge on the internet or my work wouldn’t exist.

Age regression behaviors were apparent after my brain injury, but I’m not sure when I became aware of them. Like a child I’d learn from watching other people and like an adolescent I thought I new it all and was unsure of everything.
 

 
Similar to my youth I became quiet again. I would listen to people and answer their questions, I would ask questions myself, but very seldom would it become a conversation. Just after my brain injury I always spoke with someone I was familiar with, mostly family and therapists. My world was very limited.
 
Eight months after my brain injury I volunteered at the hospital putting together packets of blank forms together for the doctors and nurses to fill out. I remember dressing in a suit and tie at the introduction meeting, like I was young interviewing for my first drafting job. I was thrilled to be productive and anxious to do the work well. At least I had some confidence when I was young, unlike when I started volunteering and didn’t know my abilities, I didn’t know my limitations.
 
When I volunteered, I noticed people around me doing their job, they were able to concentrate, they were confident and worked quickly. It seemed I could never be efficient like them. It was sad to realized how far I needed to go to become healthy again. I understand I was volunteering only twice a week for a couple of hours but eventually I became good at what I was doing and felt like I was contributing.
 
A year or two later, I attempted to volunteer at a graphic design office. After the meeting, I realized how incompetent I was and unrealistic to think of myself as being productive.
 
Another regressive behavior is my sleeping. I needed to sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon when I was young. Now, again I need to sleep in the afternoon or I become frustrated, my thinking slows and my walking becomes more erratic in the evening. In short, I fall apart since my ability to concentrate is depleted.