The Twilight Zone of multiple concussions

I'm self/un-employed. I'm busy. I plan every day, and put every task on a timer. Here's a screen cap of tomorrow's schedule and time-table (Using ctrl + + will help for reading it:

With ADHD, I have little of what neurologists call "executive function of the brain." And what would that be? According to Webmd:

Executive function helps you:

• Manage time
• Pay attention
• Switch focus
• Plan and organize
• Remember details
• Avoid saying or doing the wrong thing
• Do things based on your experience
• Multitask

When executive function isn’t working as it should, your behavior is less controlled. This can affect your ability to:

• Work or go to school
• Do things independently
• Maintain relationships

Executive function can be divided into two groups:

Organization: Gathering information and structuring it for evaluation

Regulation: Taking stock of your surroundings and changing behavior in response to it

In practice, that means I have to spend 30-40 minutes a day assembling some artificial executive function by coming up with a schedule like the one above with a spreadsheet that I keep. Then I put it all on timers. It's like having a meeting with myself and coming to an agreement on all my tasks for the day, how much time I will spend on each one, and in what order I will do them. What you don't see on the spreadsheet sidebar is the part below, where I list every task I plan on doing, in the order of required frequency. The reason I don't show you that is I want to tell the entire world everything I'm planning.

I'm able to do this with medication. Without the medication, forget it. Even with medication, I have occasional days when I can't conform to the schedule. I call those "my days off," and almost all of those are unexpected. Like today started off as an impromptu day off because I couldn't follow the schedule. Even with all this, I have horrendous trouble getting long-term projects done, but it's not like I don't work. I can document that.

Before I had the medication and this system, I either drifted through the day, or I'd conform with other people's plans. Like I'd never prepare meals. Now I do, but I eat basically the same things every day. Grape Nuts with soy milk and tea in the morning, PBJ for lunch, and for dinner a daily rotation of homemade chili, cold chicken sandwiches, and tomato/cucumber chick pea salad for dinner.  

For writing, it's taken me forever to learn how to outline a novel. Without the outline, everyone in my writers' agree that I write up great scenes. The problem is, the scenes don't follow the same plot. As a result, I have two drafts and a few more false starts, adding up to 1,400 pages.

I have other symptoms that don't quite fit with ordinary ADHD. One is a partial speech deafness, where my native American English can sound like a foreign language. That's why in the last few years, I've speculated to myself there might be something more to this, for which ADHD is one symptom.

I've kept my suspicions from my friends and family. Until recently, I didn't think it was important to my life or the trajectory it's taken. As a child, I was very concussion prone. Eight. Two of the most severe ones I suffered before I was six-years old. I went through childhood traumatized by them. They gave me nightmares where the headache and the murderous sensation of them came back to me. I didn't receive medical attention for any of them. My parents, inadvertently, encouraged me to walk off or hide injuries, or be ashamed of how they happened. 

I had one more concussion in my mid-twenties. At the time I was depressed, wasn't taking care of myself, and thought if I could walk, it wasn't serious. 

Current medical science has found concussions are worse in the long-term than previously suspected, and multiple concussions are cumulative in their negative effects on a person's brain. It didn't occur to me until recently they might have a lifetime effect on me.

Besides childhood and that one definite concussion as an adult. There were altogether three other  incidents, adult and childhood, I suspect were concussions by how they felt. However, those were momentum injuries where the brain hits the interior of the skull without a direct blow to the head, such as with a hard, running fall, where I got up dizzy, with a headache, and my ears ring. Or being in a traffic accident where my car was spun and knocked into something.

For the ones in childhood, three were from bullying, four were caused by "playground accidents." One, as a toddler, was an in home accident. At least one of them, a vicious beating by a much older kid, left me with PTSD. I know this by the nightmares and jump scares I had. The results: if I were threatened I would freeze. So, I was known as a coward. A more minor effect: at a pool, I couldn't dive. Going headfirst was too much of a threat. I had a similar problem in the short time I took gymnastics.

I bring this up now, because I have headaches during the day as I follow my schedule, and not ordinary headaches. When they happen, it's like my thoughts seize up and cramp. I can't keep track of what I'm doing, nor can I remember what my next task is, nor my previous task. I'll look down at the list, and then I'll immediately forget what it said. I absolutely can't think, couldn't solve 2+2. Trying to work through it is like spinning my wheels in deep mud.

If I lie down quietly as soon as I notice this happening, I recover in twenty minutes. If I have to work through it, as I used to at work, I'll make error after error. Worse, my mood goes down the toilet,  angry or despondent, or both. I used to linger through work, and when I got home I'd sleep from three to twelve hours. Yes, I was having this trouble when I worked, and it's worsened through the years. My last job was very fast paced, and it could put me in a bad state quickly.

I remember these episodes being a problem, well, since childhood. I thought I just had ordinary headaches and a nasty disposition (which I hated myself for). I went to a neurologist, and this is before the more serious, chronic effects of concussions had been documented. He told me I had migraines. 

Now that I'm officially disabled, they're easier to deal with.

How is it that I didn't receive any medical care, despite in a few instances being knocked out?
Concussions just weren't taken seriously when I was a child, and during most of my adulthood. Like racism, concussions used to be great classic comedy. Remember The Three Stooges and how funny they looked when they were hit in the head with a "Clang!" Then, if it was Shemp and not Curly, he'd get this blank look to the sound of cuckoos and birds tweeting?

The "Clang!" was okay, but did bird songs get a comically association with concussions? I'd never describe a concussion as anything serene. It's more like the Beatles "Revolution 9," only more discordant. It feels like the whole world is crumbling .

As a result of too brain trauma comedy, neither myself, nor the adults in my life took the concussions seriously enough. If I wasn't completely knocked out, I got up embarrassed and tried function with the headache, despite feeling awful. Usually the accident or loss in a fight was embarrassing enough.

As for medical care, the one where I was knocked out is an example. My classmates picked me up from the blacktop, and walked me into the nurse's office. The "nurse" wasn't very good at her job, because after she had me lay down for a half hour or hour, she put me right back into class! My brains might have been scrambled at the time, but I'm still certain I wasn't given any real medical care.

Maybe I had ADHD and a mood disorder anyway, but can't help wondering how different my life would be if I didn't have those injuries, and if they definitely weren't addling me as an adult. Knowing this doesn't change any of my plans. I still want to write novels. I just have to keep coming up with workarounds.    

PS. I finally got bold and did something with the blog layout. I hope it's easy on the eyes.