Short-Circuiting
July 15, 2018
One of the joys of cycling is the freedom it gives to explore the world in a way that riding in a car cannot match. I will never forget the way I felt the first time I got on a road bike as an adult. Though the beginning was somewhat awkward, once I shook off the mental cobwebs of how to ride a bike, I found myself pedaling down the street, and within seconds I felt what I later realized was pure joy and excitement rushing through my veins. The feelings were familiar, but in a distant way; like trying to recall the details of a movie I watched 20 years ago. So I kept pedaling, thinking to myself, “What is this feeling?” And then, as I turned my first corner and found myself lifting my hands off the handle bars like I did when I was 10 years old, it hit me – I felt like a kid again. Innocent wonder with a sense of adventure completely unbridled, and that feeling of exhilaration that comes with new discovery were all coming back to me. Suddenly, the world was simple and beautiful again, and the hope of new adventures around the corner was shining in my soul. Though I had learned how to ride a bike as a kid, Sam is the one who taught me how to ride a bike as an adult, and who brought me on this first ride where I was reminded of the joy a couple of wheels on a frame with pedals can bring.
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After Sam’s accident, once Sam was back home after the experiment/debacle of being taken to his estranged father’s place, Sam did his best to recover on his own. At home Sam was still under heavy influence of whatever mystery pills had been prescribed to him at the hospital, the same hospital where he nearly died from what he later suspected was an overdose inadvertently administered by hospital personnel. Back and forth between his recliner and his bed, Sam spent the first several days flitting in and out of consciousness, with nightmares, vivid dreams, and waking to shockingly unfamiliar internal surroundings.
It took days before Sam could cobble together enough consciousness to be awake for hours at a time. Two weeks to the day after being released from the hospital, Sam took his first walk. Having gone from riding and running outside every day to being cooped up inside all day and night was becoming torture, and this was on top of the torture of being in a neck brace and being semi-conscious. Sam had just had his first taste of fresh air earlier in the day when he went with his mother to meet his son Brady at the bus stop. For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Sam couldn’t stop thinking about how good it felt to be outside. So, later that evening, Sam decided to go for a walk. Sam’s plan was to walk a short distance around the neighborhood. He just wanted to be outside. It seemed simple enough. And, just like that, Sam started walking. Not giving a thought to the fact that he was in a neck brace with a broken neck and what it might feel like to go alone on this walk, Sam left the house and started out towards the same bike route he had ridden and run on so many times before. As he walked, ever so slowly, Sam took in as much of the evening’s air as he could, and even caught a few strained glimpses of the sky as he tried to look up from the confines of his neck brace. Despite being in pain, Sam was grateful for the miracle of his survival.
Then it happened. Abrupt Nothingness. It wouldn’t be accurate to say he saw black, because Sam didn’t “see” anything. Instead, suddenly and with no warning, Sam had the sensation of waking up, while he was walking. Where he was, he had no idea. Why he was there, he didn’t know either. For that moment, Sam could not remember what he had been doing or where he had been going. All he knew is he was standing somewhere, alone, and he was not home. What was worse is he had no idea how to get home from wherever he was. Sam was completely disoriented, even though the corner where he was standing was one he had passed by riding, running, or driving, thousands of times over the course of his 13 years living there.
After what seemed like an eternity, Sam eventually made it home, terrified by what had just happened. Though he did not know what it all meant, he knew there was something horribly wrong with the way his brain was working. He also had this deep and heavy feeling that if the wrong people were to find out that his brain was not working properly, they would use it against him. This feeling only intensified his fear.
What happened next is classic text-book brain injury stuff, but Sam did not know it at the time—no one did. Arriving home after getting lost in his own neighborhood on his first walk since the accident, Sam was terrified that he was losing his mind. Fear gripped him like a vice he had never felt before as he thought to himself for the first time in his son’s entire life that here was something his son’s mother could finally use against him. Naturally, Sam became upset. The old Sam would have discussed this with his mom, who he had been close to his whole life, so doing what he thought he should do because it was what he used to do, Sam went to his mom to tell her what had happened. What he wanted to say was that he had a really frightening experience and he was afraid. But because his emotional filter had been slammed out of his brain when his head crashed through the windshield of a Toyota Camry 2 weeks prior, Sam was not able to just calmly discuss the situation. Instead, he was crying uncontrollably, pleading with his mother to understand that what happened on his walk was a sign of something being seriously wrong with his brain.
Maybe she could not understand fully what Sam was trying to tell her, or maybe she could and out of her own fear she reacted the way she did, and maybe she even thought she was being helpful by telling him everything was fine, not to worry about it, that it was not a problem. No one knows, but to Sam she came off as dismissive and annoyed, and then, before he knew it, she had turned her back to him and had left him alone in his room, standing in the dark. That’s when Sam felt and watched himself catapult into a new level of orbit he had never experienced—Sam found himself running out of his room towards his mom screaming hysterically. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Brady was standing between Sam and Sam’s mom, screaming at Sam not to talk to his grandmother that way and posing in martial arts stances so as to let Sam know he was prepared to physically fight if he had to. In even the healthiest of people, adding chaos to fear can be like adding lighting fluid to fire—it creates flames where none existed and causes those already ignited to blaze much higher. Perceiving that everything had gone completely off the rails, because it had, Sam snapped. However, unlike before his accident, when “snapping” would have consisted of a loud voice and stern words at his son in moments of discipline, on this night Sam found himself reaching for Brady and grabbing him by the shoulders as he screamed and cried. As though possessed by some cousin of the Incredible Hulk, Sam clutched onto Brady’s shoulders, unable to let go, despite Brady and Sam’s mom screaming Sam’s name. It was as though he was being electrocuted when his grip had landed on Brady, and despite Sam’s own shock and terror, all he could do was hold his son, cry, and drool.
Later, Sam would learn that this type of reaction is common with people who have traumatic brain injury. But at the time, Sam had not yet learned that, and all he felt was shame and horror at what had just happened. Sam had never behaved this way. This was not who Sam knew himself to be. So, Sam immediately did what he thought was best, and he asked his mom for help to watch Brady for a few days, thinking maybe this would just pass with some rest.
Very soon it was clear that Sam was different in other ways. One night he almost caught the kitchen on fire because he had tried to boil an egg and didn’t realize there was a dishrag on the burner. In the face of flames, it still took several seconds for it to register that the dish towel was on fire. Another night, on one of these late night walks where, for whatever reason Sam found himself wandering to the scene of the accident where he had nearly been killed, he became so afraid of sounds he heard in the trees that he started running, in his neck brace, doing who knows what damage to his broken neck. Sam, who had been the definition of independent and self-sufficient, was suddenly afraid of being alone in the dark, and found himself sobbing uncontrollably on a daily basis. He began noticing other differences too. He was struggling with talking on the phone because he could not quite seem to keep up with people talking. Processing information coming in had become difficult and exhausting. Everyone seemed to talk too fast and everything else seemed too loud, and gone was his ability to tune out the background noise, both on the outside and inside his head. Everything was just too much. He found himself using the wrong words for simple things, or unable to find words at all. Before long, Sam found himself wanting to hide from most people he had known before the accident, worried they would notice the differences in him and judge him for it.
Eventually Sam would learn that all the things he was experiencing are commonly experienced traumatic brain injury symptoms. He would also learn that there was such a thing as after-care specific for traumatic brain injury, and it was not just to leave the injured person to fend for himself by himself at home with no treatment, supervision, or support. Sam did not know what was happening or what to do about it, and no one in Sam’s life seemed at all concerned with educating themselves on what to do to help him either. Much later, Sam would be told by doctors that the best thing for brain injury is to slow things down, reduce the stress, quiet down the noise, and dim the lights, not just in your house, but in your life. No one told Sam after his accident that he needed to have as little stress as possible to allow his brain the opportunity to heal. No one told Sam that he could expect to have memory loss, communication problems, or any of the myriad of symptoms associated with brain injury. Instead of hearing from his family about how they were going to help him deal with his brain injury and how life would need to change because of it, Sam heard from his mother that he needed to get back to work as soon as possible, and from his previously estranged father that he needed to get back to taking care of his son, again, as soon as possible. To add insult to injury, it took no less than a few weeks before he started hearing from both of them that he needed to stop “acting strange,” and that everything just needed to go “back to normal.”
And so there it began, the nightmare after nearly being killed by a car while riding his bike. But as shocking as it was to Sam then, he had no idea this was just the beginning.