The Traumatic Brain Injury that saved my life

I ran from my problems for a solid fifteen years after my husband died. Five years after his funeral, I gave birth to a beautiful and perfect baby girl, conceived as a miracle from a short-term relationship. Her dad and I probably should have broken up not long after we got together, but we were both too broken in different ways to love each other properly. Today’s psych lesson: Trauma Bonding. The concept that if you believe yourself to be terribly broken, you will attract to yourself only other broken people, often while not having a great opinion of humanity in general.

I developed a severe drinking problem after her dad and I split up, when she was about a year old. We shared custody while I worked several jobs to try to keep us all afloat. After my dumpster fire of a life situation moved me out of state, things got strained, and my drinking habit got worse. After several years of moving around, trying to work and keep up with child support, and subsequently falling into a fairly abusive relationship that didn’t last very long, (remember, trauma bonding) I found myself jobless and homeless in the autumn of 2017. I had pushed my entire family away in my grief, and what little time and money I had to spend on my child wasn’t enough. Her dad threatened to have my license revoked or have me jailed if I didn’t cough up child support money. Or, he casually suggested, I could just give him full custody, and he’d make the rest go away.

For the record, he’s not the villain in this story. I had been a human dumpster fire for nearly ten straight years. I hated myself. My family was sick of me (or so I felt). I had no one to lean on (barring a single friend who picked up the phone when I called and another friend who took me in. You both know who you are. Props, dudes). So I signed full custody of my daughter to her dad and he promised me a photo once per year on her birthday. Signing those adoption papers for his wife was the hardest piece of paper I ever signed, and yet, I knew it was for the best, because that way she could grow up without me messing up her life, and speaking as the child of divorced parents (there’s a lot of us out there) I felt like it was the first truly noble thing I ever did as an adult.

I managed to claw back to my feet with the help of my two friends, and got another healthcare certification (the letters I got at age 32). I worked in healthcare some more, and learned what risk adjustment was- the process of your health insurance company combing through your medical records and hoping you have more chronic diseases because they get checks from the government annually. I wish I was kidding. Your health insurance company hopes you’re sick. Really think about that one for a while.

After a year of this job, something broke in me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had a great and well-paying job in health information technology and I threw it into the trash to go work in a bakery for minimum wage. Not long after, I found myself in hard drugs to cope with all the trauma I hadn’t dealt with for roughly eleven years. And there was… a LOT. I had just gotten remarried and I thought I was fine because of the happiness of newlywed joy, but the darkness I had avoided crept back in shortly after our marriage which led to the substance abuse.

Shortly after beginning my spree of drowning myself in hard drugs, an inflammation problem in my feet started up. Since I worked in healthcare so long, I knew that an anti-anxiety medication I had been prescribed was also prescribed for inflammation. Since I was thinking “inflammation” and not “brain” when I took this drug, I took it alongside hard drugs that messed with my dopamine receptors. I had been warned not to mix psych meds with MDMA (the street drug, ecstasy). Let me tell you why this warning exists, and further, maybe don’t do drugs, kids, because this is when my brain metaphorically ripped itself in half. When the neurons in your brain are being competed over by both uppers and downers, that’s when your brain goes to war with itself, and I spent approximately fourteen months completely insane. Most people think of traumatic brain injuries as being a physical injury, like a car wreck. In those cases, you know why you’re suddenly acting weird, but in my case, I actually had no idea. It was a chemical injury, and it didn’t even set in right away, which made figuring out the problem all the harder.

This brain injury actually saved my life.

Holly, how can a traumatic brain injury save someone’s life?

I’ll tell you.

Imagine you have a big shiny balloon full of cake. Why is there cake in a balloon? No idea, but we’re going full speed ahead with the metaphor anyway.

You put that balloon on a shelf because it’s shiny and pretty, and the cake is in good condition when you shoehorned it in there, but you leave that balloon full of cake on the shelf so long… you forget there’s cake in there. You are completely oblivious to the rot inside of that balloon because the outside is still as shiny as the day you shoved cake in it.

In my case, it was wedding cake. I never properly grieved my husband’s death, which led to substances that I only used to distract myself from the pain I never addressed.

Imagine eleven years of not addressing rotting cake in your bedroom. There’s a stench in the room, you are getting stomachaches and headaches, you aren’t sleeping well, and yet you have no idea what’s causing it because you totally forgot about the cake. So you go to the doctor who wants to prescribe you four different drugs and two of them have death listed as a possible side effect. You deteriorate worse and your doctor makes a bonus for selling those pills.

That brain injury was a needle that popped my balloon, which spewed rotten cake all over my bedroom. Rotten cake is splattered on my bed, the ceiling, all over the carpet. There’s rot and stench everywhere. It’s disgusting, and one might think well and hard about just burning the whole house down rather than endeavor to clean that awful mess, because there’s just so much of it.

For months, I was essentially schizophrenic. The two halves of my brain fought each other, night and day. I didn’t sleep well. I stopped eating because “everything is poison.” I was suicidal for those months. I talked to myself, ran around at 3am, and even cut myself at times. My brand new husband who saw me through my drug addictions toughed it out and did his best to support me, but it took months for us to figure out what had actually happened, and even once we knew what the problem was, it was an uphill battle. *This man, y’all. There are not enough steaks or beers to thank him for his perseverance and love, but dadgum, if it takes me a century, I’ll try.

I thought I was getting better, but then I fell off the wagon back into drugs six months later, and then two days after that, after not sleeping OR eating, my husband found me hitting myself on the head with a hammer. To this day, the only explanation for that I have was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was playing in my head.

He called 911 and got me an ambulance.

I spent six hours in an ER room crying my guts out. It was the first time I ever properly felt all of the loss I had suffered through the course of my life, and this short post is the truncated version- I’d been through a LOT. I spent a subsequent week in a psych hospital eating and sleeping, before coming home to fix the mess I’d made of my life.

When I came home, I donned a hazmat suit and ordered 42 boxes of Magic Erasers off of Amazon.

It was time to clean up the cake.

***

You know what the best part about traveling through hell is?

Not being there anymore.

True story.