Posts Tagged ‘concussion’
Gathering Facts
Taking advantage of Cyndie’s reduction in activity, we spent some time while she rested yesterday, creating a chronological outline of the medical issues she has experienced throughout her entire life. If each one were a chapter in her autobiography, the book would be more than 40 chapters long.
We came up with 15 surgeries and 3 or 4 medical procedures, starting with one before she was even a year old and not counting two pregnancies or the time she stepped on a rake and split her eyebrow open. In some of the occurrences that have happened since I started blogging, I was able to hunt for and find exact dates, including pictures.
I wonder if I have a picture for every surgery.
After searching, we couldn’t find evidence that I had blogged about the concussion she had that took us days to figure out because she didn’t remember what happened when she hit her head. She picked up a friend the day after and remembers telling her of having a severe headache. The day after that, Cyndie was home, and we were hosting a visitor. Cyndie looked fine in the morning, but in the middle of the day, I noticed Cyndie had developed a profound black eye that extended from her forehead to her chin.
Why I wouldn’t have written about that is a mystery to me. I was also hoping to find a picture of how vivid her bruised-looking face had become. That led Cyndie to make a doctor’s appointment, which resulted in her getting an MRI of her head.
She loves telling the story of the technician asking ever so gently if he wasn’t also supposed to get a view of her face since it looked so bad. Both of us laugh about her having already signed up for a Master Gardener class that she tried to complete despite the concussion but, in the end, wasn’t able to remember much of anything she learned.
It was a very interesting day-long exercise of dredging up past events and then trying to compile a chronological outline with dates so we could have all the information in one place. So many stories that we’ve told and re-told over the years, but never before locking in dates or the order of events.
It paints quite a varied portrait of incidents, both dramatic and mundane, in her medical history.
Now that we have the outline, I’m eager to capture some of the interesting details that can present a fuller story about what her experiences were like for each of the different incidents.
Maybe I’ll end up amending the subtitle of this blog to “*this* John W. Hays’ take on Cyndie’s experiences.”
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Knocked Silly
We were in the backyard playing with Asher off-leash on Monday. I had just returned from the health clinic in River Falls where I’d been given the second shot of a vaccine for shingles. I like to use my arms as much as possible after a shot to disperse the injection and reduce localized pain. Roughhousing with the canine was helpful right up until it wasn’t at all.
Asher was with Cyndie when her phone rang. I was downhill from them, sitting on the ground. As Cyndie answered the call, Asher suddenly bolted straight for me. I barely made it to my knees before he had closed the distance and he wasn’t slowing down. Unable to make a move to dodge 70 pounds of beast barreling toward me, I turned my head as Asher made impact.
The collision knocked off my prescription sunglasses, sent my hat flying, and threw me to the ground, face down with my head pointing downhill. I don’t remember dropping the gloves I was holding. I lay still for a while trying to establish my level of consciousness.
I wondered if Asher was okay and whether my ear was bleeding. It felt like my glasses had cut me. I decided Asher was okay because I suddenly became aware of him zooming faster than ever back and forth across my prone body with one of my gloves in his mouth like a prize.
Reaching for my ear, my hand came back dry, so, no cut. Cyndie missed witnessing the collision but soon after, deduced something had happened and walked over to me while continuing with her phone conversation. I wobbly made my way to my feet and sought to retrieve my glove from the dog who was masquerading as a freight train on amphetamines.
“I think he may have given me a concussion,” I said to Cyndie. Asher showed no sign of damage to his thick head. I was feeling tender behind my right ear, opening and closing my jaw several times in search of some kind of assessment of damages.
The collision brought on a headache that lasted for two days. By Tuesday morning it was becoming hard to tell whether my achiness was due to the shingles vaccine or the dog collision. It’s safe to assume it was both. I was beginning to hurt all over. It seemed logical to reduce my activity for a day or two, which worked well in conjunction with days of horrid air quality due to more wildfire smoke from Canada.
Yesterday afternoon, sleep beckoned and I succumbed to a heavy nap for more than an hour. Upon waking, it felt like I’d been knocked silly.
Because, well… yeah, I was.
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Relative Something 