Thursday

Thursday, November 29th, 2018. Perhaps it ended up being a normal, or even fantastic day for anyone else. I am happy for all of my readers who had a pleasant Thursday, November 29th, 2018. That was not the case for me. As I awoke in the wee hours of that fateful day (well, I guess I was unaware of it being a fateful day yet) I knew something wasn’t quite right with me mentally. As I navigated through the day, I felt increasingly disassociated with myself and my surroundings. A series of events occurred towards the end of the day that are strikingly clear in my memory. I ate dinner at Noodles and then went to Goodwill where a seizure caused me to collapse, hit my head with enough force to cause my first serious head injury; a concussion, skull fracture, and subarachnoid hemorrhage (a type of brain bleed, and possibly a type of stroke, that was never made clear to me). You can look at the packet trying to explain what was going on in my head, although the packet was, ironically, headache-inducing.

The next thing I remember deciding to buy painting of a raven eating a raspberry and talking on the phone with my friend. Then, BOOM! What felt like two seconds later I awoke in terror in an ambulance, greeted by a red-headed stranger with strikingly blue eyes asking me, in an order I don’t recall, the name of the president and what month we were in. Prior to that moment, I had never felt such paralyzing fear, caused by not recognizing my surroundings and uncertainty of the answers. 

Don't worry, I got the answers right. Trump. (Thanks for the further aggravation, red-head paramedic dude! Trump was not the first thing I wanted to think of upon waking) The other question seemed like  two answers, December OR November should let that patient pass the "do I have a clue what the F is going on!?!?" quiz. We were basically on the cusp. But it was November, which I knew, so I "passed." (On that note, I am not exactly sure what failing would be...it's not like they would kick you out of the ambulance for getting a bunch of questions wrong. Plus maybe it is POSSIBLE that some people just don't know the answers. Some food for thought there...)

A CT scan in the ER revealed the bleeding in my brain and got me admitted to the ICU for the next day or so. The medications injected into my IV in the emergency room started and continued with Ativan, a strongly addictive Benzodiazepine, as well as Fentanyl and Dilaudid and handed to me in dosing cups caused my mind to swirl in a dense fog of questions, every emotion imaginable, and a multitude of healthcare personnel buzzing around me. 

When I was discharged, I left the hospital with folders containing information about concussions and brain injuries as a whole. More on that later.