White noise between dreams
Like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.
Dear you,
I don’t know how else to start this, but around 11PM on August 1, I fell asleep while walking up the stairs at home and fell all the way down.
My dreams have not been the same since. REM sleep has always felt like cerebral housekeeping—the work of weaving all the stray threads from my conscious world into narrative simulacra. All my dreams after the accident have felt like my brain trying to navigate around demolished hallways in its architecture. Each plays out until it hits a wall—my phone stops working, a companion turns into someone else, a path runs out of road—and then it begins again in the same place with a new story. The record starts to skip, then the song starts again. Ad infinitum until I wake up.
I woke up a couple of hours after the accident as I was being wheeled around the hospital on a gurney. This part felt the most out-of-body, like the nightmares you try to force yourself awake from. I was soon horrified to realize I was awake as they took x-rays and CT scans of my whole body in search of broken bones and head trauma.
By later that morning, I was hooked to an IV and a vital signs monitor and my neurologist gave me an inventory of the damage. It feels odd reading the reports again now, just matter-of-fact observations on the insides of my head after a traumatic brain injury. In sum: a skull fracture and a subdural hematoma behind my left ear and another subdural hematoma somewhere in my right frontal lobe. Plus I temporarily lost hearing in my left ear, aaaand the midline of my brain shifted to the left by about 6mm.
Reader, it sounds like a lot (and it is) but the first day, I honestly believed I’d only need two days in the hospital to recover. I even found an email I drafted that day with the subject line “FYI - Minor Emergency,” trying to inform one of my producers that my script submissions would be delayed by a few days. The neurologist’s estimate was two weeks in the hospital. In the end, it would be eight days.
My body’s recovery has refused to be linear in the month and a half since. It would make sense to tell you that the first day was the most painful, but that day flew by without much trouble. The worst was maybe the third day, which I spent shaking and sleepless with a headache grinding through my brain, despite my round-the-clock pain medication. By the next day, it felt manageable to tell a few friends about the accident with this picture:
I spent that week in and out of sleep in my hospital bed with my sirang plaka dreams. Whenever I was awake, the head pain kept me moody and unable to keep food down. I learned quickly how a hospital room becomes a revolving door of medical professionals, each there to wake the patient up again for some new requirement. There were the neurology fellows who came in a few times a day just to ask how I was, the ENT who wanted to conduct a hearing test on my bad ear, the nurses who checked in to keep me clean and comfy and the medtechs who drew a little blood every day to make sure I was responding well to treatment. And because it was the hospital where my mother worked, folks would just drop by to talk to her.
My brain couldn’t tune anything out so every conversation in the room happened in sharp focus. A couple of days into my confinement, they talked about how the hospital was approaching full capacity with COVID cases. Another day: the story of a doctor who died a few weeks before from a fall similar to mine. Every day: another version of the story of how I fell.
On the fifth day, I got a new CT scan showing enough improvement for them to let me leave the hospital by the eighth day. The car ride home was surreal. I guess after spending a week bedridden, hurtling forward through space at 30-50kph fucks with you.
The strangest part about coming home was how everyone treated me like a newly fragile person (which I was). I refused the wheelchair they’d borrowed for me but I waddled around for two whole days before my legs remembered how to walk properly again. I spent two weeks holed up in my sisters’ room because they were scared to have me going up and down stairs.
At this point, if I turned my head the wrong way, I’d get hit with some bad vertigo (possibly BPPV). I’d get knocked off balance and the world would spin until I tilted my head back to center.
I woke up every night between 2:00 and 4:00 AM with my head throbbing, forcing me to get out of bed to pop a paracetamol and hang around the kitchen for an hour before trying to sleep again. It was strange to be up in these hours, like it was this liminal space between dreams where I had to sit with the pain by myself.
The first thing I learned in a grade school art appreciation class was you had to stare at a painting or sculpture until it spoke to you. Can you do the same with pain?
By the third week, many of the physical side effects had subsided. Fewer headaches meant going off 24/7 pain medication. The hearing slowly returned to my left ear. I went back to walking Sherlock twice a day. I began slow and steady yoga classes (with Belle, an icon) twice a week because I wasn’t allowed any strenuous activities.
And I’ve been trying to write this essay for weeks but it’s been a bit of a struggle telling this story. Am I still too close to the event to process it, or is my brain literally still broken? I have had to accept that there will be some fracturedness in the telling. The healing has been neither coherent nor linear, so why should the story tie up neatly?
I still wake up in the middle of the night. Whoever is writing my dreams is leaping over all these broken synapses, running into walls. I have tried many ways of articulating what’s it’s like thinking through a traumatic brain injury, but maybe the simplest is to say I am never as awake as I’d like to be, that I am constantly staring at pain, waiting for it to speak to me.
My biggest hurdle has perhaps been reckoning with survival itself. There were many ways to die from a fall down a flight of stairs. There were many ways to have been hurt worse than I was, but by some twist of luck, I am emerging from this brain fog mostly the same person—just now afraid of falls, slower on stairs and worried about twisting my neck the wrong way. (I don’t trust myself to survive something twice.)
(And I don’t know what I survived for.) In the face of a pandemic, of a climate crisis, of my own myriad miniature despairs, I’m not all that sure what good is left in survival, and yet I cling to it so instinctively.
I have had to divest myself of the notion that survival means something, that is the final step before a tumble towards a great epiphany. Must it mean? Or am I just supposed to vibe with it?
Shrugging through the struggling,
Apa