In Mandalorian culture, individuals who had suffered debilitating brain trauma could mark their armor with a unique sigil that would indicate their condition to any who saw it. The sigil was comprised of the Mandalorian runes for M and S, and short for the word mir’shupur-“brain injury,” when translated from Mando’a to Basic. It served to notify others of the wearer’s disability, while at the same time acting as a badge of honor recognizing the wounded individual’s prior service. Mandalorians who saw the mir’shupur sigil on another’s armor knew to treat the wearer gently, and to offer ready aid should they appear to be in need of it. [Wookieepedia]

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I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I was six or seven. My sixth grade language arts teacher held me after class one time to ask me to please write about anything other than Star Wars.

Before the prequels were made, I disliked Boba Fett so much that I had a headcanon where he stole the Mandalorian armor he was wearing. I don’t know why I thought that.

(Hey, special shout out to Temuera Morrison and Robert Rodriguez for making me like Boba Fett now.)

So, as a massive Star Wars fan with a traumatic brain injury, the idea of the mir’shupur sigil existing in Mandalorian culture is incredibly comforting.

I got it tattooed on my neck.

My traumatic brain injury means that my behavior may be “off” at times and finding out that Mandalorians had a sigil to identify someone with an invisible disability who may need a closer eye at times was kinda sorta extremely emotional for me.

I got the mudhorn tattoo because I have had so many hits that resulted in concussions over the years that my brain broke, but I’m still standing. I got smacked around by a proverbial mudhorn, but I survived. I suppose it’s a symbol of my metaphorical armor.

In Mandalorian culture, they follow the Resol’nare—the Six Actions.

The Resol’nare goes like this:

Education and armor, self-defense, our
tribe, our language and our leader—all
help us survive.

To me, the most important thing is education. The more knowledge we have of all aspects of the universe and our own existence, the more empathy and understanding we have for the life within it. It’s why I wrote this book.

My armor may not be physical besides the design I drew from Loki’s pauldron I’ve had on my left arm for years and the mudhorn on my hand, but it is a metaphorical armor. Armor in my own skin. I have the mir’shupur sigil on my neck because I don’t have a helmet.

Self-defense is something I’ve been focused on my whole life. I’ve done martial arts classes for Taekwondo and Muay Thai, I took up archery when I was ten, I can predict outcomes of physical actions (and potential reactions) so I have fantastic aim and have fired several guns. But I respect the power of weapons and the capabilities of the human body. I don’t seek to use my skills to hurt people. I seek the knowledge of my own capabilities.

My tribe is humanity.

Language is the second most important thing to me. I may have taken classes in Greek, Spanish, and American Sign Language, but I’ve taught myself so many more. Latin, for example, has made it much easier to work out how to read other European languages. If you know the root word for something, you can understand what’s being said or written with context clues.

I don’t have an specific leader whose cause I would rally to…but I think I do have a responsibility to support those who need help, ergo—

My leader is Humanity.

I wrote this because I think this way of sharing my own knowledge and experiences could be supportive. I may be disabled by a traumatic brain injury and not capable of doing the things that other people can, but I am capable of sharing my own knowledge and thoughts. I’m not arrogant enough to think it will change anything that has consequences, but I do think that someone out there may benefit from what I have shared.

Be it a new idea that sparks ideas of your own, a laugh when you don’t think you need one, or just something to pass the time, I hope this book about my experiences has given you something to think about. Maybe I put another wrinkle in your brain.

Knowledge is power. After all, that’s why it’s so often suppressed by those who are selfish enough to think that other people are less important them.

You, dear reader, are important to me.

Don’t forget to hydrate.

The edge of that table straight up knocked the self-deprecation regarding my appearance—not thinking I was pretty enough

That’s gone.

I am pretty.

I genuinely don’t care what other people think anymore. I used to constantly worry about not being “enough” for everyone else. Or “too much”.

It’s astoundingly freeing—not caring what anyone else thinks.

When I was trying to get a job during the recession, I went on countless interviews after which I never received further contact from my interviewers, and I was frustrated. After one job interview where I was rejected, I was told to come back tomorrow for tips on interviews and more information on a job opening in ALEC for a graphic artist, and he wanted me to look over who they were and what they stood for.

ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, and their main agenda is rewriting state laws regarding our rights so the legal language loopholes make it easy to sneak in things that the right wing can’t obtain by being forthright. They’re also corporate funded. Their beliefs are the antithesis of my own.

The next day, I told the guy I didn’t want to work for someone whose political stance was entirely opposed to my own. He said: “if you want a job, you should leave your own feelings at home. Work is work.”

I reiterated that I couldn’t do that, and he moved on to the tips he had.

“You should smile more—you don’t look like a fun person to be around.”

I started crying. I don’t remember anything else he said because he didn’t stop talking while I cried across the table, but I dissociated until he stopped talking.

In contrast, after I got back from medical leave from my last job, I was still having lots of trouble (proud to say I solved the whole “what’s due when” disorganization by getting everyone huge yearly planners because post-it notes are pointless if you don’t organize your timeline for your projects) with needing to leave work early or lie down for a bit and generally having seriously stressful symptoms, and I was already stressed because I was moving to Texas. While we were going through my schedule so I could pass on my current projects to the new employee, my boss told me that it was good that I was moving, because he might have fired me otherwise.

The last time some job interviewer looked me in the eye and said shit like that to me, I fucking cried in front of them and sat there while they talked at me.

TBI Jenn?

I looked my boss dead in the eye and just raised my eyebrow and left to make coffee. It’s strange having a positive change to my personality. It feels like cheating. No more body dysmorphia. No more shame. I will not take bullshit anymore.

I suppose it’s a trade off for the constant pain. “Sorry I’m making you hurt all the time, here: I fixed your ego.”

I’m a lot more blunt than I used to be.

It’s taken a long time for me to get here. Recognizing my limits and not pushing past them was a slow process.

I’ve come to realize three things:

1. 1. The next concussion will either disable me further or straight up kill me.
2. 2. I find option one a horrifying nightmare existence since life is hard enough already.
3. 3. I can’t change which one happens.

And there is a “next” concussion. I’m not lucky enough to avoid whacking my head hard enough to rattle my brain around for a ninth time.

I’m a pragmatist—not an optimist.

The realistic outcome of another head injury in my case is, simply put, bad all around.

Jokes about helmets and bubble wrap are all well and good the eight hundredth time around, but I need people to understand a hard truth about head trauma:

It doesn’t get better for some people.

It gets less frightening as you get used to your new normal, but that is exactly what it is. The new normal.

And it’s okay that it sucks. It’s okay that I have good days that sometimes trigger imposter syndrome, or bad days when I can’t sit up without more pain, but I can’t stop coming up with things to write.

It is okay that I need to lie down in the dark so I don’t hurt as much.

I did all the fulfilling things in life when I was a child and I lived in so many different places and saw so many different things that most kids don’t get to experience. And as soon as I got to the age where I was finally getting to “adult” and had job security, I got a TBI at work and now I’m restricted to laying in the dark in order to avoid constant cluster headaches.

While I’m angry that all of that school and stress that I went through (all that wasted and expensive effort) still happened, I’m also relieved. I know my limits now and I’ve found contentment with them. I can rest after so many years of stress built up over and over and over.

So, I think being constantly stressed and on the point of suicidal ideation every few years makes this traumatic brain injury feel like something that has upsides to. I may hurt all the time, but I feel a lot less unsure about who I am since the concussion happened.

I think we as a society are becoming more and more aware of trauma and its potential consequences by being more open to the idea that sharing it with others, and it is a good way to cope with it all. I think social media and forums like Reddit are helpful in informing people who need questions answered.

Answered questions make the present feel less frightening, because the more you know, the better prepared you are.

Because my brain has always catalogued quotes—I have a lot memorized and there are two quotes I think about a lot when I remind myself to be patient.

“Proper preparation prevents poor performance,” from Constable Benton Fraser (“Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father and, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, have remained attached as liaison for the Canadian consulate.”) in the 90s TV show Due South regarding knife throwing, and “what one man can do, another can do,” from Anthony Hopkins’s character in The Edge (regarding killing a Kodiak bear that’s hunting him and Alec Baldwin’s character).

After nearly a decade and hindsight regarding my symptoms, I can tell that I’m declining. I used to be able to drive and go see a movie. My short term memory was bad, but now I’m forgetting things mid-thought more and more frequently.

Realizing that my lifespan is much shorter because of repeated trauma to my brain isn’t as frightening a prospect as I once thought.

I’ve come to terms with it. Mostly because I’m tired.

It is exhausting to be in constant pain.

I don’t really miss the person I used to be. But it has taken me years to be comfortable with my new personality. It’s the little things that get to me from time to time.

I do miss coffee. I used to love the smell of coffee—now it makes me gag. Coffee smells like old socks to me now. It tastes about the same.

I miss my eidetic memory. I had to draw and label all of the rivers in Europe for a Geography test, and that was the easiest test I’d ever taken. I just stared at the map for five minutes before I was handed the test, drew and labeled the rivers, and handed it in. I miss having that kind of recall.

I miss playing video games. I get really flooded from the test of hand/eye coordination and have to recover from overstimulation if I do play a video game.

I miss going to theme parks and riding roller coasters. I finally moved somewhere where there’s one close enough that it’s not half a day’s drive away, and I can’t ride any of the rollercoasters. I loved the feeling I’d get late at night after a day going on rides—how my body would still swoop every so often as it remembered the sensations of the day. I will never experience that again.

I miss going to the movies all the time. The last movie I was able to watch in theaters was Thor: Ragnarok. The day after I went to the movie, I was still recovering from the experience of light and sound and laughing too hard. I couldn’t put myself through that again, so I haven’t been to the movies since 2017.

That’s a huge deal for me. I used to go practically every Wednesday morning. I’d have entire theaters to myself.

I haven’t been able to withstand watching a movie in one sitting since I watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent in February of 2023.

As of writing this, it’s November. I haven’t been able to finish a movie in one sitting for most of the year.

And I hate that. I can feel my interests waning and it disturbs me with how blank I feel because of it.

I don’t miss interacting with people. People exhaust me and I’ve always preferred to be alone. I don’t have local friends and the fact that I kind of prefer it that way is a comforting thing to me. I’m not worrying about how someone else perceives me. I don’t have to force myself to socialize. I don’t remember how I used to feel about social interaction, but I can’t stand it anymore.

I’m a hermit, but I’m okay with it. I like my alone time and my quiet. It’s way less stressful. It hurts a lot less when I’m alone.

I’ve reached the stage of acceptance in grief. I accept that this is my normal now. I accept that nothing will change that. I accept that I can’t do all the things I used to be able to do.

It sucks, but it is what it is.

I’m way too blasé about almost bleeding to death.

I’ve gotten to the point where I think knowing how it feels to almost die means I know what it feels like. You get heavy and cold as your heart slows. Your limbs slowly start to feel heavier and heavier. There’s a static haze over everything and a numbness—a numb that reminds me of waking up in the middle of the night with a dead arm. You do feel and hear your heartbeat loud (Mom said she could see my heartbeat in my ears), and it’s alarmingly peaceful and I don’t like that I know that.

Because. Y’know. History of suicidal ideation.

But what’s good is now that I know it’s peaceful, I’m not afraid to die.

So. I’m your huckleberry.

I needed three bags of blood.

Let me back up a bit.

One of the last things my pain management doctor prescribed me was indomethacin—to be taken “as needed”.

Which was way too often. Indomethacin is a very very powerful NSAID, and since I’m always in pain, that meant I took it more often. Which can cause ulcers.

Except indomethacin is vicious, so it couldn’t just be a normal-sized (whatever that means) ulcer. It had to be literally half the size of my stomach. And bleeding.

Indomethacin, I later learned from my primary care doctor, is notorious for causing bleeding ulcers. My doctor was actually a bit angry that my pain management physician prescribed it to me because he considered it too dangerous in my case. According to drugs.com, “Indomethacin may also cause stomach or intestinal bleeding, which can be fatal. These conditions can occur without warning while you are using indomethacin, especially in older adults.”

And, in my case, it did cause a bleeding ulcer. One I did not even realize the symptoms of until it was almost too late.

I have a terrible problem with downplaying my own pain. I think “well, it could be worse” or “I’ve felt much worse than this before” and tell myself to push through it. It’s such a bad habit that it almost cost me. It wasn’t until I vomited enough blood to fill the toilet that I knew things were very, very serious.

I remember taking a photo of the toilet bowl and texting it to my mom saying “I need to go to the ER” and staggering to my closet to get dressed. I nearly passed out while putting on clothes and, once I was at the top of the stairs, I realized I would not be able to get down them without falling and probably breaking my neck. I had a panic attack. My dad sat with me, helped my lie down on the floor, and we waited for the ambulance. My mom later told my that my lips were completely white at the time.

I remember finally getting my breathing under control. I remember feeling heavy—my legs relaxed and my arms felt like comfortable weights against my stomach. I remember slowly calming and thinking that it was all okay. Help was on its way. I remember the world getting quieter and things getting a bit darker around the edges of my vision and closing my eyes because I felt tired and everything seemed far away. I remember the paramedics asking me questions and answering them calmly—of feeling slow as they loaded me onto the gurney and carried me downstairs.

I remember being so calm.

I was even calm when the paramedic had a lot of difficulty giving me an IV while we hit potholes on the road. I told him “it’s always hard to find a vein on me—it’s okay.” When someone nearly rear-ended us on the highway, I was more annoyed that someone would follow an ambulance that closely than anything else. When the ambulance grazed a car on the way through the parking lot near the ER, I snickered.

I needed a transfusion of three bags of blood.

I tend to deal with difficult medical situations with humor, so I joked around with my nurse in ICU. We talked about horror movies (Hell, I even recommended that he get a subscription to Shudder—it seems like I will promote them at every possible chance I can) and he apparently decided to follow my lead and be a goofy “fun” guy.

He was terrible. I was out of it with blood loss, and on the last transfusion bag, he fucked up attaching the IV—leaving it open when he went to connect the blood to my IV access port and spilling donated blood all over me. He did not get a new bag of blood. He took his gloves off and got a towel, dropped that on the floor and used his feet to kind of clean it up. Without re-gloving, he went ahead to try and flush my IV. I made a joke that now he looked like Michael Meyers because he had blood all over his blue scrubs. When he went to clean my arm and flush my IV, he did not have any gloves on. My IV had clotted and he couldn’t flush the line. Mom noticed his knuckles were white and his hands were shaking when he was pushing the plunger. To clear the clot, he went and got a huge needle and stuck it through my IV to try and break up the clot. Mom asked him if he was going to end up pushing the clot into my body, but he ignored her and ended up pulling bits of clotted blood out.

I’m fuzzy on some of this. I remember that he used my IV line and the syringes meant to flush my IV (emptying them just a little but leaving a lot of saline solution) instead of a vein for cultures. I remember thinking how it was like he was making cocktails while he was doing the thing with the wine-bottle-looking vials (he even popped the lids off them like he was bartending). Then I remembered that I took photos because I was bored as hell.

He left behind an entire tray full of trash and smears of blood on the mobile computer stand.

After that, I was given a private room and prepped for a colonoscopy and an endoscopy because the doctors were worried about internal bleeding. When I got back from both procedures, the doctors were worried about two things.

One was a bacterial infection. I was put in quarantine. After a discussion with the infectious diseases doctors where my mom and I told them about the nurse and how he spilled blood on me and didn’t put on new gloves and screwed around mixing different samples to get enough blood to use in each culture, I only remained on antibiotics as a caution since I wasn’t showing symptoms of an infection (I later realized I had his photo on my phone and that his name was visible in one of them, so I texted them to my nurse so she could inform the proper people to deal with the ICU nurse—I don’t know what happened to that dude, but my nurse was livid and promised the hospital would handle him).

The second worry was that I had an ulcer that was the size of half of my stomach and they were worried that it was cancerous. Thankfully, it wasn’t, but I did spend nearly four days worried that I had stomach cancer. I was placed on acid blockers and iron pills. All told, I spent a week in the hospital and needed eight different IVs inserted during my stay.

I’m better now. No more ulcer and I’ve lost all the weight I gained since the “find a way to manage your pain” game started.

As I said, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how close I came to dying. I nearly died of internal bleeding.

The strangest thing is how I also realized that I’d been entirely calm once I came out of my panic attack. I’d still been breathing fast, but only by reflex. I felt heavy, but not scared.

I was just tired.

I use tattoos as pain management. While I’m being tattooed, as I mentioned, I’ve often nearly fallen asleep as the scratching becomes more noticeable than my headache. And during the weeks after as I’m healing, I have something else to focus on for once.

1. Don’t scratch your new tattoos.
2. Moisturize.
3. Don’t. Pick at it. Spray it with Bactine if it itches so much.

It’s easier to focus on that than how my head feels.

I have a bad habit of comparing my pain to a hypothetical injury that an entirely different person would be afflicted by. Brian Regan did a bit in his standup about this kind of thing. It involved him comparing his pain levels against first childbirth, then having your femur get cracked in half, then childbirth with a broken femur, and eventually saying “eight” on the pain scale because that one feels “safe”.

It’s a hard kind of mindset to overcome. Especially since I have such a high pain tolerance.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been pain free.

Headaches, tinnitus, knee pain (thanks to platelet-rich plasma therapy, that’s gone), back pain…

I don’t remember what it feels like to not have a headache. Which is annoying, because I don’t recognize what it feels like to feel better.

I do well from five in the morning to about ten, but the pain starts to distract me after that.

The worst pain comes from the cluster headaches. They’re triggered by light and can often knock me off balance if I’m upright when they happen. It’s a sharp, stinging pain that comes on suddenly—like an ice pick to the temple. I’ve been told that I look like I’m being punched by a ghost when I get a cluster headache. They’re why I spend most of my time in the dark. I don’t get them when I’m in my room with all the lights out.

I’ve gone through so many different pain medications. Vicodin helped. Vicodin was also the pain reliever my neurologist wasn’t “comfortable” prescribing me, so I’ve never been able to take it again.

I’m currently vaping delta-8 for pain relief and the fact that it gives me the munchies. I have no appetite, but cannabis makes me have cravings, so I’m eating more or less normally. I’ve lost a lot of weight and I’m pretty sure the only reason I haven’t lost more is because of the munchies.

My most irrational fear is that I’ll lose this financial aid because of how I don’t have a general practitioner doctor and that that might seem, to the government, like I’m not “suffering” from a disability. It doesn’t help that it’s an invisible disability.

(I blame the people who take it upon themselves to police handicapped parking spaces because they see someone can still walk to their vehicle without assistance for some of that.)

I am almost constantly worried about not being disabled enough to continue to have access to government aid. I have this fear of having that support yanked away from me because I’ve always heard of frequent medical checks on people who are on Disability and because of the nature of my disability being a traumatic brain injury, I often forget something important about TBIs that my medical records will definitely show.

It’s permanent. Brain damage is permanent. There is no way Social Security would deny me assistance. Not after what experts explained during my second court hearing.

An employment specialist said, under oath, that I would never be able to maintain a full time job. I think I remember him saying I wouldn’t even be able to keep a job sweeping floors.

It’s too easy for me to fixate on being disabled “enough” from a day to day basis because of how random my symptoms are. Some days I’ll feel fine. On days like those, that imposter syndrome kicks in real hard.

The thing is, filing for Disability was extremely dehumanizing.

I suppose I’ve been conditioned by capitalism because I had the mindset that, if I can contribute, I don’t deserve federal assistance because I’m not as impaired as others seeking Disability.

I had to prove to the government in court that, yes, I am impaired enough that I can’t feasibly work or even live on my own. It was invasive, dehumanizing, emotionally taxing, and overall the most stressful thing I have ever done, and that’s coming from someone who went to college twice. While commuting twenty five miles each time I had class.

(No, I didn’t complete my forensic psychology master’s degree. I dropped out. But that’s another story.)

I had two hearings because the judge wanted me to take a cognitive test after the first hearing. No one told me that it took four hours to complete. Or that when I was done with the test, I then had to pour my heart out to a complete stranger and tell them what felt like my life story.

During the second hearing, there was a psychiatrist whom I’d never met who referred to me by the wrong name and claimed I had a bad relationship with my parents. I don’t know where she got that from my assessment—my parents have been nothing but supportive during all of this.

Trying to apply for Disability includes so many hoops you have to jump through—I was told I had to go to my local Social Security office to file paperwork instead of being able to file it online. I had to hire a lawyer to help me because legal language has nuance that I’m incapable of comprehending anymore.

Even that came with its own stress—finding the right lawyer reminded me of going on endless job interviews during the recession.

I can recall one lawyer barely looked at me while I was talking to him. He was focused on the papers on his desk and told me something that I don’t recall but it made me start to cry. I remember feeling hopeless about it all. I remember just wanting to quit.

The Packard Law Firm specializes in Disability cases. My lawyer was amazing even in that first meeting. It was the first time I felt like a person when talking about my disability with someone who had the potential to help me. My lawyer argued my case well and I qualified for Disability.

Just because I qualified doesn’t mean that the stress of it goes away.

Because no matter how many times I tell myself otherwise, I’m terrified that I will be cut off and left to fend for myself. I don’t know how to get over thinking like that.

I’ve had a doctor say “I’m sorry, but we’ve hit a wall” to me, smile, and then drop me as a patient.

I don’t blame him.

My last pain management doctor commiserated with me that the only possible pain management that may work for me at the time was still not legal in Texas.

(Weed. It was weed, and Delta-8 CBD was not a thing yet.)

So, I’m thoroughly exhausted about seeing doctors. All of these brain doctors trying prescriptions and injections to the point where the first general practitioner doctor I saw suggested that I go on oxygen for ten minutes for “farts and giggles” because it wouldn’t hurt to try (it did help a little).

She actually said “farts and giggles” to me.

Gosh I’m tired remembering all of them. I think I’ve seen about ten doctors. Five of those were different pain management doctors I had to see at one clinic. I had to repeat the story of my concussion five separate times in one clinic because they were super shitty at scheduling who was on staff at any given day.

Three of them refused to prescribe me any opioids because they, personally, weren’t comfortable with it.

(I was a bit more uncomfortable than them since that was the only thing that alleviated my pain.)

Of the other two, one tried a sphenopalatine ganglion block—which involved shoving two extra long cotton swabs all the way up both nostrils (think COVID test but deeper) while the doctor dripped lidocaine down the sticks and I laid on my back for forty-five minutes so the local anesthetic could trickle down into my sinuses. All that did was make me taste lidocaine for the rest of the day.

The last pain management doctor prescribed me indomethacin to take “as needed”. This instruction was later deemed dangerous by my primary care physician and I have more on that later.

My latest primary care physician moved. I can’t do it again. I can’t make myself find a new doctor. I can’t verbally repeat everything to another doctor when I’ve exhausted all medical means of pain management. I think I’d scream if I had to go to a new doctor.

Like—a frustration scream. The kind of scream that I do when I wake myself up from a nightmare where I have really bad aphasia. I scream in the dream for so long that I do it out loud and wake myself up. I sound like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks.

My first memory is of being held down by a doctor as he cleaned out my ear infection. I remember screaming because he was pushing down on me so hard that it was difficult to breathe and it hurt more than my ear infection—it felt like he was pressing down with all of his weight on me with one hand. I was barely three years old when this happened. I’ve done all I can to avoid going to the hospital since then.

I have always associated the doctor with experiencing more pain. And I do—the stress of seeing any doctor makes me run out of energy faster than usual and it makes my headache worse.

Even seeing the optometrist is draining for me. I never expected to be overwhelmed by answering the eye doctor’s questions, but this last appointment had me on the verge of a panic attack the entire time. Even reciting the letters in the eye test felt confusing—like it was too much for me to focus on. It didn’t help that I was still having trouble sleeping when I had that appointment. I think I’d been awake for thirty-six hours at the time.

Compounding factors made the trip to the optometrist extra stressful for me. Beyond the usual stress of seeing a doctor.

I don’t know how to get over this anxiety. So I avoid it as much as possible.

I was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome and chronic migraine by the neurologist who did my Botox treatment.

At the time, I was glad there was a term for the unending concussion symptoms. I had a name for the thing that was wrong with me.

The Concussion Legacy Foundation explains post-concussion syndrome as “the persistence of concussion symptoms beyond the normal course of recovery. The majority of concussion symptoms will resolve within about two weeks. In cases where symptoms last longer than one or two months, doctors may diagnose Post-Concussion Syndrome. Patients with PCS can experience concussion-like symptoms at rest or in response to too much physical or cognitive activity, often forcing them to withdraw from their usual physical, professional, and social lives.”

(I’m donating my brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation after I die—maybe something can be discovered about the progression of post-concussion syndrome from my brain that can help other people who suffer from it.)

Also according to CLF: “in high school athletes diagnosed with concussion, researchers have estimated approximately 10% will develop PCS”.

So it makes sense that I have it. I was a high school athlete (I still have my letter jacket).

When I was a kid, I had a photographic memory. I could stare at a map and recreate it accurately later, and I would draw my own maps of routes we took to get places and landmasses that came from my imagination.

After a few too many concussions, I can no longer do this. That eidetic memory is gone.

At least I’m never truly bored because of the Wheel Of Misfortunate Symptoms. Every day is different.

Aphasia is the worst one.

I have so many words trapped in my head already—when aphasia happens, all of those words turn into soup. Nothing will come out of my mouth and I end up having to either shrug and decide that it’s not worth trying to untwist or I can use ASL if the person who I’m speaking to also knows how to use sign language.

I have nightmares where I scream myself awake because I’m so frustrated this no one can understand me.

My brain feels like mush today. Like there’s just a glob of steaming mashed potatoes in my skull.

I’m having a difficult time ordering my thoughts and making them understandable when I speak. I’ll sometimes repeat myself without realizing it and occasionally stutter.

The stutter is the first symptom I have of aphasia. As soon as I start repeating the first syllable of a word, I know I soon won’t be able to get any out clearly. I once recorded myself during an episode and posted it to TikTok for TBI awareness, and watching myself struggle through a thought is slightly unsettling. But I felt that it was an important symptom to show what it looks like in someone with a head injury.

Thankfully, aphasia isn’t super frequent.

What is frequent (daily) is the cluster headaches that feel like I’m being stabbed either in the temple or the one side of my head—usually the right side—or my eyes. Cluster headaches are accompanied by a droopy right eyelid and watering eyes. It’s a quick sharp pain that lingers for up to a minute that leaves me disoriented and more sensitive to light.

I lie down in the dark a lot to prevent them. Certain lighting—like fluorescent bulbs—increases my chances of experiencing a cluster headache. I can’t walk through a Target for ten minutes without experiencing at least one headache attack.

Thankfully, delta-8 helps to prevent migraines for me. I’ve tried all the triptan medications and they didn’t work nearly as well as vaping does. They certainly had more side effects than delta-8. For a while there, I had weekly migraines.

My unending symptom is a headache that changes intensity and location constantly. It moves around day to day but it’s always there. Currently, I feel like my head is in a vice. Yesterday, it felt like I’d been hit in the back of the head. Tomorrow, it’ll be different.

Over time, I’ve also lost the ability to feel hungry. I either vape delta-8 to give myself the munchies, or I have to be reminded to eat. My stomach and my brain don’t talk much anymore.

My balance is iffy some days. Sometimes I’ll have a drunk gait.