Concussion number eight (named Jason because my most common headache feels like Jason Vorhees is crushing my skull) was probably the stupidest one.

It happened the day after New Year’s in 2014.

I was at work (graphic designer) and I needed to plug in my laptop, but the cord was on the floor underneath the conference table that three of us (me, Andrew, and Jason [unrelated]) worked at together during the day. So, I bent to grab the cord and cracked my forehead on the edge of the table. My teeth clacked when I hit the table, too. Thinking to myself that I’d hit my head much harder before (like…a week before when I got so frustrated that I banged my head on the card pinned to the cork board in the break room that read “bang head here” for when you’ve got a frustrating client) and felt that this was no big deal as usual, I continued to do my work. Then we took a lunch break, and I was told that I looked grey and that I was slurring my words.

They drove me to the ER.

The ER doctor gave me a CT scan, did the usual head injury tests, concluded that I was, indeed, concussed, and prescribed me anti-nausea medication and Vicodin. I was told to see my regular physician in a week to make sure I didn’t sprout a blood clot or anything. I ended up at a clinic the following week after I made a pot of coffee at work and it tasted and smelled nothing like coffee to me, which was alarming along with the fact that I was still woozy and had a headache that felt like a star was imploding inside my skull.

Of course, no one asked me how my head injury occurred when I was going through intake at urgent care, and the doctor who looked me over in the exam room pitched a fit and yelled at me when I said that it happened at work. “This is a workman’s comp case?! Jesus, you should have said that to begin with. You need to fill everything out again.”

She ended up telling me that I needed to see a neurologist and wrote “headache” on my paperwork. Sure. Headache. And I can’t stand with my eyes closed without swaying and almost falling over. Thanks, lady.

Here’s where things get really annoying.

Because it happened while I was at work, this became an insurance issue, and I was told that the company’s insurance would have to find me a neurologist when I realized that my concussion symptoms were still present after two weeks. I’m not even going to get into the waking nightmare of my caseworker never answering her phone or returning my calls not getting my goddamn ER bill taken care of to the point where they were mailing me collections notices for not paying the bill after several months, but I just did get into that, didn’t I?

The doctor that was picked for me put me on blood pressure meds (I consistently showed low blood pressure when I got it checked at her office) and then tried a pain medication on me that had known interactions with the depression medication I’m on. You know when they say: “if you have any of these side effects, see a doctor immediately,” in commercials for medications? The combo I was on resulted in extremely vivid hallucinations.

So, on top of all that nonsense, I had no idea why I still had concussion symptoms after so long. I’d had a headache for weeks that was moving around my skull. Then I’d had the headache for months. Now, it’s been over nine years, and I still have a headache. The neurologist diagnosed me with something called “post-concussion syndrome.” Some people recover from it in a few weeks, and others in a few years. Some people never recover.

No dosage of NSAIDs or acetaminophen will alleviate the headache pain for me. When I brought this issue up with the neurologist, she said that she “didn’t feel comfortable” prescribing me anything stronger than the 800mg ibuprofen horse pills.

Those didn’t do anything, either.

Side note: if you are a doctor, your feelings one what to prescribe should not factor into how you treat someone’s chronic pain. Your comfort isn’t the thing in question when it comes to your patient’s pain management.

I ended up moving to Texas in the middle of all of this, and I was able to get an appointment with another neurologist who had better physician ratings online. Of course, I had to wait two months to see said neurologist.

I’ve gotten so used to flooding (sudden and intense pain) that I don’t even remember what not having a headache feels like. There isn’t really anything that can be done for post-concussion syndrome, either. At least, there isn’t anything beyond pain management.

(Which is to say that right now, I’m vaping delta-8 and it prevents migraines. And I don’t even need a prescription.)

This new neurologist checked me over and was so much better than the previous one because she listened to me and went over my symptoms and explained shit to me. She added “chronic migraine” to my diagnoses and, because of my bad interactions with the usual concussion treatment medications, started me on Botox treatments.

Botox treatment is made up of having thirty four injections of Botox in the face and scalp (I kind of weirded out the nurse by being able to sit like a rock through it all and I remember telling her that the inside of my head hurt way more than multiple injections). The first round of injections helped with my constant vertigo, but did nothing for my headaches. I was prescribed Treximet, which helped slightly, and then had another round of injections done.

The pain got worse. I had to go to Urgent Care multiple times for migraines that hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe.

I was then referred to a Headache Institute doctor who referred me to a Migraine Clinic doctor who helped me alleviate my neck pain, but did nothing for my migraines.

My short term memory is still extremely bad, and I’ve discovered that I have a few big memories that I don’t recall at all. My mother mentioned that I’d driven her to the ER once before, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Not when I did this, not why, and not even if I’d driven in her car or mine. There’s nothing but a big blank spot, and I just have to take her word for it. I also lost a memory of staying in Manhattan overnight after playing tourist all day. I remember walking on Wall Street at the end of the day and seeing a dude dressed up as a sad panda, then I don’t remember much else.

So, that’s always alarming.

Having a traumatic brain injury has made me question myself. I sometimes feel like I’m an actress in a movie, and I didn’t get the script revisions. I’m in the middle of a scene where I’m supposed to say my line, but it’s the wrong one, and I have no reference for what the right line is.

Yes, I’ve hit the top of my head on the ceiling twice.

In our old house in Virginia, the attic was finished for my mom’s embroidery computer and I used the scanner in there often. I once stood up before I cleared the slope of the ceiling and broke my glasses that I had propped on my head. In my diary, I complained about breaking my new glasses and still having a headache three days later.

My second encounter with a ceiling happened when my dad and I were replacing the sheet rock in the basement after a pipe burst in the ceiling one winter. He let go before I was ready and I dropped the sheet rock onto my own head. I remember seeing black spots when it happened.

There was the wreck we had in my sister’s brand new used car—she’d owned the turquoise Geo Prism for about three hours before we were rear-ended at a stoplight. The car that hit us was going about 35 miles per hour and knocked us into the car in front of us. I’d just commented on how the CD player didn’t even skip at the abrupt stop my sister made and then we were hit by a drunk woman in a Suburban.

I got hit by the windshield blowing out against the back of my head. I was picking safety glass out of my shorts while we waited in the hospital for my sister to get checked for a concussion. I don’t remember what she was diagnosed with (whiplash, most likely), but I remember having a blinding headache and just wanting to go home.

I genuinely don’t remember what not having a headache feels like. I’m not sure I’d recognize it.

After graduating high school, I had less opportunity for head injuries. It was more down to me being clumsy (dropping Sheetrock on my own head is next level clumsy) than me being an athlete.

Samson apparently killed a thousand Philistines with a donkey jawbone, and I remember thinking “yeah I believe it” when I hit the back of my head on a horse’s jaw. Her name was Kit.

You see, what happened was—I was feeding her an apple and when she bit it in half she dropped it and I bent down to pick it up. Right when I started to come up from a crouch, the horse craned her neck down to try and beat me to the apple and BAM. Kit’s jaw hit the back of my head.

A horse’s head weighs about a hundred pounds. I was not standing up slowly. She was not reaching down slowly. I hit the back of my head on the edge of her jaw, balanced myself against her neck, and I remember seeing spots. In a tumblr post about the incident, I mentioned being glad that someone had a codeine pill I could take.

Here is where I curse Past Me for not taking that head injury more seriously.

Just because I have had a head injury in the past that felt much worse than whatever worryingly hard knock happened, doesn’t mean the current noggin hit isn’t as dangerous.

That’s my biggest issue. Just because I’ve been through worse doesn’t mean what just happened wasn’t bad. I have a skewed sense of pain.

It’s so skewed that I’ve gotten drowsy during two different sessions at the tattoo parlor. I do recall actually dozing during the tattoo on the back of my left wrist and came close to falling asleep entirely during the one on my neck below my right ear that’s the Mandalorian sigil for a brain injury. Oddly—or perhaps not that oddly, given how a different pain can be distracting—getting tattooed is pain relief for me. That’s how weird my pain tolerance is.

For contrast, I was in a car accident in 2006 and I was treated for whiplash. I totaled my truck and couldn’t turn my head without everything hurting. They left me strapped to the backboard for three hours. The pain of the weight of my head pressed on one small spot was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I was essentially laid out in a stress position for those three hours. I remember my mom shoving her hand between my head and the backboard after I started crying from how much it hurt because I was still immobilized from the ambulance ride and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Not seeking help for head injuries also stems from my discomfort with doctors. More on that later.

My third concussion overall happened about a month and a half after September 11, 2001 when I was fifteen.

I was trying to find my geography book by checking my desks in first and third period, then checking my locker. The teacher had said to hurry back so I wasn’t marked as “late,” and the hallways were getting to be eerily empty in that way that precedes the tardy bell. So I ran.

First off, I hadn’t been able to find my textbook. So I was mad at myself and super anxious about being late. I’m never late. I’m one of those weirdos who gets to the movie theater a half hour early so I can get premium seats and just pass the time by playing pinball or Bejeweled on my phone.

Secondly, I had to go down a flight of stairs and around a corner to get to the geography/yearbook room, and time was running out. So I was sprinting.

Thirdly, I was wearing combat boots and running on slick tile flooring.

You can see where this is going.

My feet slipped with about fifteen steps to go down the staircase, and I caught the railing. However… My hands were sweaty, and the railing was stainless steel, so my grip was like a toddler’s. I smacked my arm on one of the squared metal pegs that jutted out three inches above the middle of the rail, and my hand slipped off. I fell ass over teakettle down the last ten steps, landed on my back, and smacked my head on the floor. After hanging out on my back for a second and saying, out loud, the line Trinity said in The Matrix (“Get up, Trinity. Just get up. Get. Up.”) after she dive-bombed through a window and fell down some stairs—also hitting the back of her head, I blacked out.

(Watching that scene again, her landing looks exactly like mine—thunk goes her head)

I don’t remember how I got up at all—I just popped back into awareness about five feet from the classroom door and realized that I couldn’t bend my left knee at all.

I beat the bell, at least.

I was in a bit of a daze when I sat at my desk and looked at my knee to see why it hurt so much. I saw a tear in the pant leg of my overalls. There was a bloody cut on my knee.

Mrs. Gallitz, the geography teacher, was even more worried when I told her I fell down the stairs because her husband did the same thing just a few days prior and dislocated his shoulder.

I ended up going to the nurse (she gave me a bandaid for the cut on my knee and told me to go wash the wound and get back to class) and the fact that I almost tore my ACL kind of trumped the whole: “I blacked out for an indeterminate amount of time and now I’m nauseous and shaky” thing. The head injury wasn’t even addressed. I don’t even remember if I told anyone that I also hit my head. As a student athlete, I was mostly worried about my busted knee.

My kneecap hit the edge of a couple steps hard enough to tear my denim overalls. When I checked myself in the restroom the nurse told me to go to, I had bone-deep bruises on my left arm where the posts between the staircase railing hit me.

(Side note: we never had actual nurses at school—the most they ever did was hand out bandaids, make you lie down for a while, or give you ice. I don’t remember if she gave me ice for any of my injuries, but I do remember she could not have cared less that a student was hurt after falling down the stairs and she barely even looked at me.)

Like I said, because I played lacrosse, the nearly-torn ACL worried me a lot more than the headache did. I was in a leg brace for about six weeks and had worsening pain for years until I found a physical therapist who suggested platelet-rich plasma therapy after I started my master’s program in forensic psychology. I was on crutches in class after PRP therapy.

PRP was done by taking plasma from my blood and directly injecting that plasma beneath my kneecap. I did PRP therapy twice and I haven’t had serious knee pain since 2012.

With how painful a bum knee is, I think I forgot about the fact that I smacked my head on the floor, too. It’s easier for me to forget a headache than the shooting pain from my knee to my lower back.

In eighth grade we spent P.E. Learning how to play lacrosse and I was hooked. I’d read about it in My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and was excited to play the sport from that book. My mom encouraged me to try out for the team in high school, and I was put on offense for my freshman year. Sophomore year was spent on defense, and I played goalie in my junior year. Senior year was spent as team manager because my knee was causing me problems. (More on that next chapter).

I think the worst concussion I’ve ever had happened during lacrosse practice when I was sixteen. We were doing a scrimmage with the JV girls, and Coach had me playing defense. I was tracking one girl on offense, and she somehow tripped me and I went crashing into the ground. This was during February in northern Virginia, so the ground was still basically a grass-covered block of ice. Next thing I know, I’m on my back, my glasses and the goggles I wore over them are fucked up, and Coach is kneeling next to me and asking how many fingers he was holding up.

I saw a bunch of fingers. This was not the correct answer.

Later, I’d find out that he told my mom it sounded like a watermelon being dropped on hardwood when I hit the dirt. I have no memory of leaving lacrosse practice, and I think I didn’t immediately ask to be taken to the ER because I’m an idiot who thinks: “suck it up, rub some dirt on it, and move on” when this kind of thing happens.

(I once refused to go to the ER when I broke my wrist and had my mom make me an appointment for the following morning because I wanted to show off how high my pain tolerance was to my classmates. As an adult, boy howdy did that probably make the doctors judge my mom for not forcing me to go to the ER.)

Either that, or my mom drove me to the ER right away. It’s probably the latter, considering how I can’t remember pretty much anything of the rest of that day. I remember sleeping a lot and not having a blanket while I was on the gurney in the hospital. And how they kept saying I hit my head on a hardwood floor no matter how many times my mom and I corrected them.

I fell asleep during my CT scan. I kept falling asleep no matter how hard I tried to stay awake.

I don’t remember much of anything else after that. I don’t remember the weeks after. I don’t remember if I missed school. I don’t know how I recovered from this concussion.

Maybe I never really did.

I was born in Vandenberg, California and my dad was in the Air Force. He was transferred to Iraklion Air Force Base in Crete before I started kindergarten.

I loved Crete. The weather was mild, the food was amazing, and it wasn’t crowded. I miss it to this day. We lived there for almost three years before Dad was transferred to F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

When I was eight, we were set to move from Crete to Wyoming and had to ship all of our furniture across the world before we left. The Base Housing loaned us what everyone called “stick furniture” because it was that classic boring military-same-looking stuff that was cheaply made.

So right before we’re about to leave Greece we got to try out what a coffee table might be like if we decided to get one for the new house.

There was this TV movie about a guy who lived with an actual pack of wolves in the wild back in the 90s. I remember as we were watching it during the scene where he drinks a lot of tea to mark his territory around his camp, I leaned back too far the wrong way on the couch while my mom warned me I was going to fall, then I remember falling (because she was right) and hitting the back left part of my head on the corner of the stick furniture coffee table that I wasn’t used to being there. I remember seeing stars and thinking of cartoons getting hit on the head.

I had a huge goose egg.

I remember being glad that I normally sleep on my stomach when it came to bedtime. I didn’t have to fight all night trying to find a comfortable way to sleep.

Not long later, I was violently ill on the plane the entire time we flew from one side of the Atlantic to another. I puked all over the carpeted floor in the New York airport when we landed back in America.

Until writing this, I hadn’t connected me hitting my head with my increased nausea. I don’t recall ever feeling so sick on any other flight I’ve taken. The flight was so long and I was new to flying—there weren’t enough trips under my belt to be able to say to a degree of certainty that flying always made me nauseous. I was eight. Kids get sick on airplanes. I’m not even sure how soon our flight was after I hit my head—just that it happened after we shipped our own furniture overseas.

I don’t get sick on planes anymore. I don’t fly anymore. The last time I was on a plane, the entire ordeal of walking through a massive building with bright lighting, dealing with airport security, and waiting for my plane was flooding to such a degree that I never want to fly again.

Which is a bummer. I liked the plane ride part of travel. For a while there as a kid, I wanted to learn how to fly a plane. I even went to space camp two summers in a row because I liked doing the flight simulator exercises. I was good at the satellite docking program.