Monday, December 7, 2015

Lucky




The HFC is in bed. It's a spring morning, just getting light. And his wife is there with him. She's clearly exasperated and, less obviously, worried. Maybe even scared. She's saying to him: "Look, I can't keep telling you this over and over... Just let it be. Maybe later you'll remember more."

Now,  you see,  I remember this scene and the things that happened after it. I do. Right now, months later I remember it clearly. But the thing is: The minutes and hours leading up to that moment are completely gone. Lost in the impenetrable darkness of a traumatic head injury. In the end I only lost about 24 hours of my life to that black suck, but I was super lucky. Lucky to be with a friend and not alone. Lucky that friend is an old hand at assessing the injured and getting organized. Lucky that my helmet did its job. Lucky it wasn't worse.  Lucky that I got better quickly.  And lucky that in 24 hours I snapped out of rebooting every 90 seconds and returning to:

"Did I break my helmet?"

Every time.

No, seriously, every time.  Hundreds of times. Some people stay there for weeks, I did not.

Yes. You broke your helmet.
Concerned people ask: "Was it scary?"

Well, from here, no.

Because I don't remember how it was not to remember. How it felt to be unable to remember the plan, the sitting president, the date, the house I live in, my son graduating a week before. What it was like to come to consciousness and be changed. And if I did manage to feel the awfulness of it, within 90 seconds it was erased by a reboot and a return to:

"Did I break my helmet?"

I struggled a long time with "What happened?": Was I going too fast? Did something distract me? Did shit just happen (to me)?

I had a fair amount of time to contemplate all of this as I was banned from anything resembling reading, computing, tv, music, or exercise for a month after the crash.

Watch clouds. Think stuff. Sleep. Repeat.

I spent some of that time relearning to feel my heartbeat all through my body, working on breathing through the rhythm of it, breathing in the spaces between the heart beats.

I don't know what happened beyond that I crashed really hard.

But I do know I've been lucky beyond words.






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