Lungimsam, early on after my 8th+ concussion, I was told I needed cognitive therapy at least three times a week. I also did vestibular therapy. Essentially these therapies all tried to recreate the circumstances of life in an artificial environment and try and get me to do what I couldn't do. I saw multiple problems with this approach. First, the cost to get me to, through, and home from each therapy session was significant. My wife had to drive me, taking her away from her work at home for at least three hours (90 minutes of driving plus an hour there), my cost in brain energy (I didn't have enough for the rest of the day, and needed time to recover for a week plus, but was being seen every other day during the week), and the cost of repeatedly focusing all that brain energy on what I couldn't do. If it helps, the main issues I experience with my brain injury are various cognitive deficits, including little short term memory, variable brain fatigue due to inability to filter out sensory input, and constant neurological vertigo on two axes (like being in a twirling, twisting seat in a roller coaster that goes any direction at any time).
I realized I had the perfect "therapy" environment at home: young kids often creating chaos. I created a "sanctuary" so I had a place to go and recover as needed (it also became the place I learned to go before my TBI rage hit, when I was getting over stimulated). I also focused on things I could do rather than things I couldn't. a minute or two with my kids (this has expanded over the years to being up to an hour at times with the wee ones, we have four now, and doing multi-day bikepacking trips with the older ones), hiking, running trails, and biking remote roads and trails, writing, reading, etc. What I discovered is that by focusing on what I can do and what I love doing, I engage my brain, accomplish something real, and also push the periphery of my capacity, developing new pathways. Also, my vestibular therapist early on said he'd done all he could for me and the best thing I could do was continue to hike my mountain trails. I've come to call this approach chronic brain injury recovery (though it seems to apply to any chronic health issue), and now understand that the medical world is completely geared for acute care of trauma, including their therapy, which is why it is geared and focused wrong for chronic recovery. At some point early on (3-24 months) in an injury like this, there is a shift from acute recovery to chronic recovery, and the approach also needs to shift. Instead, the system keeps people in "acute therapy" too long, everyone gets frustrated by their lack of progress, and they get told their healing has stopped, they're as good as they'll get, or that they're regressing. Nonsense! The end result of this approach after 13 years is a cumulative effect from a multitude of baby-step miracles that individually may not seem like much (though they each have made an enormous impact of our family's quality of life), but looking back at where I was 13 years ago the difference is stunning. A lot of the improvement is due to coping strategies (I can run and bike despite the vertigo not because it has improved any, but because of deeply developing my proprioceptive system by going barefoot.), but a lot of these improvements are organic to my neural structure either healing or developing around the damaged areas. I look forward to seeing where the next 13, 26, 41 years take me! Grin. With abandon, Patrick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
