The Ghost in My Brain by Clark Elliott

Author:Clark Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

AT LEAST WE CAN LAUGH—PAIN AND HUMOR

There are low points with concussion, but there are amusing times as well. Here we will touch on one of the low points—concussion pain—which none of us likes to think about. But then we’ll look at the other side of this life adventure too, examining one of the many bizarre episodes that ultimately were just so quirky as to be funny.

PAIN. Pain, relative to concussion, comes in three forms: the head and neck pain that comes with thinking, nausea, and the intense pain of sensory overload.

My form of head pain originated inside the top of my head and spread over the sides of my skull. Neck pain was intense, starting underneath the base of my skull and then extending down along the thick muscles that connect to my shoulders. This neck pain was felt as an undifferentiated, throbbing ache that would not go away.

In the first months after the crash I had head pain from when I first rose in the morning until I went to bed in the evening. It often woke me up at night. Later that first year it went away—unless I had to think, which of course was relatively often. I went through several large bottles of ibuprofen to help with the pain, which over time led to a minor stomach ulcer.

I am lucky to be pretty good at dealing with pain. For example, I haven’t bothered with dental novocaine—preferring to deal with the pain using meditative techniques—though I’ve had a few fillings and four dental caps over the years.

But concussion pain is significant. I learned to go to the 7-Eleven store near my house to get a large bag of ice if I was going to attempt, say, balancing my checkbook, or working out the geometry for building a dormer in my house. For certain kinds of mental challenges requiring the manipulation of symbols, such as even simple arithmetic, I would start to get nausea and head pain within about five minutes. Within ten minutes the pain was so intense that it was hard to keep going. At the twenty-minute mark, depending on the task, I would be gritting my teeth, sweating and shaking. But sometimes the work just had to get done, and I had no choice but to persist.

While I was working, I would have had the bathtub filling with cold water. When the pain got so bad that I couldn’t push through it anymore, I would empty the ice into the tub, take off my clothes, and lower myself down into the ice water to freeze the muscles in my head, neck, and upper back—thus getting at least some relief. Lowering yourself into an ice bath is . . . inconvenient. And it doesn’t get easier over time. But it was better than the head pain.

As discussed, the link between our bodies and the muscles that control our eyes is complex: with even a minute change in the orientation of our head we adjust our eyes to keep them stable with respect to the environment.

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