How do You Know When You are Home?

One Memory Stands Out.

Three years and two months after the fact how much can one remember if you don’t keep a journal, or at least a blog?   I know my memory of events is questionable but I thought I had anchored down a few salient items I had modicums of recollection of and would use these to form the basis of these TBI entries.  Not the case.  Or rather, many of my remembrances are either mixed up, or melded together. 

I wanted to write about coming home so I went through some of what I was going to say with my wife.  And I had it all wrong.  I remember a ‘ride’ home from the hospital and this was my first exposure to sitting in the middle of the back seat firmly harnessed in, shoulder strap and everything.  I would ride in this position in cars for many, many months to come.  I also remember on this particular trip that Renee, a very good friend of the family, had come along with my wife and sat beside her in the front seat.  But, this was not my ‘coming home’ so to say.  Rather it was just a ‘visit’ home before I was released from the hospital.  I had forgotten, plain and simple.  It must have been the weekend between Christmas and New Years Eve.  Now that my wife and I were discussing this visit a tiny drop of what went on that day returned to me.  My neighbor had come over and as we watched football together he tried to convince me that I was a Dallas Cowboys fan.  Nice try.

From there I don’t remember the actual return trip on January 3.  I do know that before releasing me I had to take the ‘test’ so that they would have a base line on my recovery efforts.  Results from that evaluation (this they did not mention to me) revealed receptive and expressive language deficits, diminished performance at all levels of verbal memory, and perseverations / disinhibition consistent with frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction due to… TBI.  For some reason, to keep trying is good when you are problem solving at work, but bad when you are taking a neuropsychological evaluation.

   I did get home, as mentioned I sat in the middle of the back seat, and this time (I stood corrected) no one sat in the front with my wife.  It was mid week and my children were at school, and after school activities so I didn’t see them when we returned.  I don’t remember anything of this part of the day really.  I was told my in-laws came to the house to visit, as they had many, many times while I was in hospital as they took care of my teenagers.  I may have been sleeping in the afternoon, as this has become a wonderful habit that haunts me to this day, so if they did visit it must have been short.  I was also told that the dog, which I make fun of in my social commentary blog (http://comicfictionnoir.blogspot.com/), came and quietly sat by my feet, for hours.  I have other interesting stories to tell of her parental approach to me upon returning from the hospital, but these I will save for another day.  I also know that my ability to adjust to temperature is very limited and so the small space heaters we have in our house are always now set close to where I sit, and this temperature regulation disability is brought out in one of the episodes involving the dog.  Our dog is definitely canine, and beautiful, and smart.

There is a story here that I can tell now, as it involves the dog, the wife, and whatever people see at the end of the tunnel.  First the dog.  Of course I was told this part of the story because I have no recollection of it.  When I was in ICU, pictures of my family and the dog were placed near my bed.  The nurses / attendants would come in and talk to me even when no one else was around.  They would show me the pictures and ask me to tell them who the different people were.  When my wife came in they called her Maple.  She asked them why they called her by that name and was told; “He told us your name when we asked who the woman in the picture was.”

Of course my wife’s name is not Maple, that is the dog’s name, and it is not Mary, which was the next name I came up with when re-interrogated.   Eventually I got it right, but this leads to the second half of this story.  This part of the story I used to tell to people when they asked me of my experiences in the hospital, but when I told it the conversation immediately changed and so my feeling is that no one wanted to hear it.  It goes like this; when asked about what I remembered most from my stay in hospital I told them that I remember someone sitting next to me every night.  I remember not so much from seeing this person, ‘the angel’, but rather from feeling her presence.  This person became my rock upon which I clung, the only thing I wanted to cling to, and in so doing she helped me back to this side of the precipice.  I waited for her visit every day.  As time passed a face did align itself with the vision and the face looked very familiar.  It was the face of love.

There is one thing I do remember from my first day home and it involved my wife.  I knew then and I know now that my looks, while never really ‘superior’ had taken a dive to the side of the spectrum upon which horror films are based.  When looking in the mirror on the effects the accident had on my face all I could think about was Mary Shelley’s picture of Prometheus, unbound.  And yet that night when we crawled into bed together my wife made love with me.  How we actually managed that one is hard to imagine, or describe.  I had no strength to allow for me to get on top, and it hurt too much for anyone to climb onto my chest, lying on my side was not pleasant either but somehow we did manage.  And, lying side by side as we whispered to each other I felt alive and thankful to the woman of my dreams.