On to the next hell, continued, recovery
On with my story. To be honest, I don’t remember much to this day. I know that I moved back to Connecticut to be near my daughter, but I have no idea if it was weeks or months before I moved back. I didn’t ask my family or anyone to help me out with a timeline because I wanted this to be completely sincere about my recollections. But one thing is absolutely certain, it was a very bad idea to move back. Not for reasons that had to do with my daughter of course, she was still too young to realize what was happening. I’m more talking about health wise. I was still in very bad shape. Both mentally and physically. I was taking a lot of pain medications, I still had trouble walking, I got fatigued very fast, it was hard for me to make food, shower, take care of myself. It was extremely difficult for me to spend quality time with my daughter. I didn’t want to take her back to my little hotel room, and I couldn’t really spend time with her where I used to live with my ex-girlfriend. That part created its own problems on top of all the other crap I had to deal with. So life was extremely difficult. I had to go to doctor appointments. Most of the appointments were for procedures and I needed a ride there and back. Reluctantly, my ex drove me to them. I think the angiograms were the worst. The doctors cut a little hole in my groin into the artery and they put a catheter in that went up into my brain area, shoot some dye up there, and look at the veins and see if there was anymore damage. The only cool part was seeing it on a live x-ray. That part wasn’t so bad, it was when they closed the artery that was extremely painful. They had to clamp it shut, it wasn’t a lot of fun. I think I had about 5 of those done. Along with MRI’s and CT’s. I know at one point I went into where I worked to say hi to everyone, but I had no answer for when I could go back to work. The doctors still said 3 months, but that wasn’t very realistic. That job was my dream job, and I only worked there for 6 months when this happened. All of the employees donated their vacation time to me so I could still get a paycheck while I was recovering. I can’t thank them enough for that. I still keep in contact with one of the engineers there. I have a feeling I was only out there for about a month, and then I had to move back to California. I believe that my family definitely did not agree with moving back there so soon. But I had to see my daughter. After I moved back, I still had to keep the recovery process moving. I know I was taking a lot of Vicodin for the pain. I have no idea if I took any other medications at this point. I started to build up a tolerance for Vicodin and I was taking around 3000 mg for it to work. Eventually, I just stopped taking it. It was too much and frankly not helping. So I developed a very high tolerance for pain that has never gone away.
So the 3 month mark comes and goes, and I wasn’t much better. I still couldn’t turn my head, my muscles were slowly growing back, and my appetite was slowly returning. I was even starting to take normal poops again, I know that’s gross, but its part of the process. Reader beware, I’m kind of gross sometimes. I probably should have put that warning in earlier, my bad. I was getting used to the constant changes in my pain level, but the dizziness and nausea were getting hard to deal with. Just side effects I had/have to deal with. I don’t like throwing up and I was doing it a lot. But I had to push through it to get better. Getting better seemed like an impossibility to me and I suffered the mental effects of it. I was still angry, depressed, and many other emotions that weren’t healthy. I didn’t want to hang out with friends or family, or even go anywhere because it was such a struggle. For some reason, driving didn’t really effect me much. That’s one thing I could do, but not very often at this point. I saw a neuropsychologist because I was dealing with PTSD. Apparently it’s normal for this to happen and these specialists deal with my kind of injury specifically. I think that helped me a lot, too bad I have no memory of it. This is around the time that I became a guinea pig to experiment on different treatments to give me the best quality of life. I had physical and occupational therapy, and different drug treatments. I remember the doctor trying to inject a steroid concoction into my head. I only remember because he jabbed the needle into my head a bunch of times for each treatment. They were trying to numb the nerves in my head. But the surgeon moved them out of the way during the surgery and didn’t put them back in the right place. I did two treatments of that I think, and since they couldn’t find the nerves, they stopped doing it. The physical therapy was very difficult. It’s hard to go through it because it’s a lengthy process and from one session to the next, it feels like you’re not making any progress. And before you know it, the 6 month mark goes by and I’m still not back to work. And on to the next post. I hope anyone reading about my accident and recovery can take a little joy out of the humor that I inject here by making you smile and at least for a moment, forget how bad life can be sometimes. Even if you have a great life, I hope you enjoy reading. These stories are not meant to depress people or to make anyone feel sorry for me. It isn’t in my nature to complain. I enjoy writing and sharing what I have to say. I try to be lighthearted about it to offer a sense of hope for anyone who deals with the crises that come up in life.
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#medication #donate #tolerance #dizziness #mri #therapy #humor #recovery #CT #coworkers #journey #hope #pain #nausea #bestadvice #angiogram