(Broadcast on The California Report)
I was riding my bike to work more than two years ago when I found out what it was like to have a traumatic brain injury. A car, making a right turn, hit me from behind and I was flung onto the hood and the windshield. That’s the thanks I got for trying to reduce my carbon footprint. At least I got the satisfaction of totaling the car.
I have no memories from the week after my accident, a result of the brain injury and drugs that induce amnesia. I know I was in intensive care. I’m told I’d wake up and curse loudly as I tore at the tubes and braces connected to me. I had bleeding in the brain in two places. Maybe there would have been more places if I hadn’t been wearing a bike helmet.
For at least three months I had cognitive problems. I had little short term memory. I’d repeat myself and not recall what people had just told me. Once, when asked where I lived, I gave the name of a city I hadn’t lived in for a dozen years.
I wasn’t allowed to drive. This meant I occasionally asked my 82-year-old father to drive me around town. Even in my brain-damaged state I think I would have been less of a menace on the road.
My wife was patient and strong as I recovered. My two small children were… well two small children. I was short-tempered with them, especially my seven-year-old son. There was a distinct period of time when I would break out in tears very often for little or no reason.
I was working, then, as a talk show host for KPBS in San Diego. And I returned to the air as a guest on my own show, interviewed by a fill-in host. When I listen to the recording of that show today I’m stuck by how distracted and slow on the uptake I sounded.
One lesson I learned was how personal this medium of radio is. I still have a stack of cards and emails I printed up from listeners who heard about my accident and wrote to wish me well. I had become a friend of to so many people I’d never seen.
A doctor told me I’d heal up. Pretty soon, he said, I’d have a hard time remembering why I’d been in the hospital. I wish. Today, I still have burning pains in the lower part of my body. I take Vicodin for that every day. I still can’t fall asleep at night without my sleep medication. The thing about brain injuries is you never know how they’re going to affect you. The nerve damage I got in that accident is still part of my life, and it may always be.
But I’m lucky because it could have been a lot worse. I had a family that took care of me, drove me around and fought my battles with the health care bureaucracy while I was still pretty much out of it.
I’m not glad I got hit by that car. But you learn to count your blessings. And no… I’ve never ridden a bike since.
CUL-DE-SAC 