Mammon

The Dialogue

The Magdalena

A4 oil pastel and watercolour pencil on paper

Covid19 sketches 2021

The Making of Me

I was on my way home from work at the beginning of December 2007, when my life was flipped into orbit in a road traffic collision, when riders of stolen mopeds having a race, and me turning right, on my bicycle, intercepted.

Now all of you can Yah, Boo, Hiss because not only was I an irritation on the road as far as many people are concerned – bloody cyclists – but I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Now, before you start jeering like they do at PMQ in the Houses of Parliament (ordure! ordure!) let me tell you Irony Number One: I was saving up for one as a Christmas present to myself and, Irony Number Two: my brain injury was caused by whiplash, as my head was sent rocking to and fro in the sudden propulsion from nought to fifty mph in the space of seconds, sufficiently to cause a couple of bone spurs in my neck to dislodge, and causing the frontal lobes of my brain to bash repeatedly against the bony inside surface of my skull. Had I been wearing a helmet, I would have come out with exactly the same injuries, and it is still debatable whether any jaw bone or eye socket fractures really took place, as they (my mother) said, early on, “If you had been wearing a helmet, your eye socket and jaw bone wouldn’t have fractured.”

I have since referred to the discharge notes from the hospital at that time and “multiple injuries” is very vague and general and, frankly, most of what happened in the first two years after the accident is like a weird dream to me now, as it was at the time. I think I cycled to an Ophthalmology appointment at St. George’s Hospital in early 2008 and was told that I had “post-concussive vision” which was why, for several months, I saw as if there were gauze over my eyes, in that Impressionist, Pointillist style so admired in Early 20th Century art; but this could as well be a dream. No-one stopped me from cycling, which was as well because public transport gave me travel sickness – I suffer nausea as a bus or car passenger ever since the injury – and I was only really advised not to drive for 6 months after the accident. When, after that time, I hadn’t developed epilepsy, my right to drive was simply reinstated – if it had ever been revoked in the first place. Sixteen years on, one wonders about this sort of thing.

I have always, it seemed, looked “fine”. Public persona very useful tool indeed. I was amazing, in fact, on my bicycle in the first year after the Injury, as I utilised the lack of ability to measure fatigue as a great opportunity to make serious gains. Alongside my calorie-deficit diet (you don’t get over an eating disorder, you negotiate terms) I was built like a racing snake and twice as fast, which enabled me to feel some self-esteem.

My ex, another brain injury survivor, remembered the first time I appeared at the Headway support group in Elephant and Castle – “you came in through a side door, wheeling your bicycle, made some sort of surprised remark, and B (the group’s facilitator) and I exchanged a smile”. Someone I had known before the injury remarked that, afterwards, I was more like a caricature of myself in the ways that I behaved, and I can see that: bawdier, more brash, outspoken, disinhibited – as is commensurate with damage to the Frontal Lobes of the brain – possibly why people might have thought I was really ‘well’, perhaps putting on an act. The same person had said to someone, “I can’t stand her attitude to her brain injury” as though it was no more than a mere bagatelle, and certainly not to be dwelled on; I know a lot of people withdrew from me as though I were attention-seeking. What they couldn’t see was the mess inside my mind: I brazened living out because I struggled to cope, and regretted having survived the accident for a long time.

“The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always works out” Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

That injury broke me in ways that have never quite mended, and it is only in latter years that I have found my strengths, thanks to courses of action that I would never have dreamed possible when I was younger. But I had to live it out for long enough for some difference to occur, and the differences which have occurred have meant that I will have to take medication for the rest of my life, if I want one.