About four months ago - it was a few days after Halloween - I slipped trying to change the temperature in the shower. I tried to grab onto the curtain as I fell, but it came down with me, and on the way down my head slammed into the bathroom counter. I didn’t hit my head so hard that I blacked out, but I did hit it fully flush. In the moments afterwards, I immediately thought, “Shit. That’s exactly the kind of innocuous injury that could turn out to have major complications.” My brother and two of my aunts have had significant concussions in the last few years, and it seemed like I was destined to be next on the list.
After I fell, I felt dazed – not pained, but confused enough that when I sat down to start writing a few minutes later I could tell that something wasn’t right. I went to the doctor, and as the week progressed and I continued to feel discombobulated, I went back to the doctor a week later. She acknowledged that I might have suffered a minor concussion.
Concussion symptoms are weird, and hard to describe to someone who hasn’t gone through them. There was no real pain for me (aside from the very occasional pinch). Mainly there was exhaustion and the feeling of a pounding hole in my head – like my thoughts weren’t completely coherent. That’s not to say I couldn’t formulate sentences or understand things, but rather that there was some kind of a gap in my thought process. I was like a computer that still worked fine in spurts but was incredibly laggy and needed a restart every 2 hours. For about nine days I rested up, mostly avoiding the internet and work. When I did go into work, I wore thick clip-on shades to shut out the industrial lighting at my job, and occasionally earplugs to block out the music, conversation, banging doors and utensils – essentially, all the sounds that inevitably come from working in the kitchen. Once I hit my head, it was like my sensory register was turned up to 11 – all the little sights and sounds that I had spent years learning how to block out were coming at me like they were blaring out of movie theatre speakers.
I basically spent a week in bed with the lights out. About nine or ten days after my initial concussion, I got up and tried to take a walk around the neighbourhood at about 9 in the evening. To my surprise, it went well. I wore the shades to shut out car headlights, but other than that I had no real difficulty handling the sights and sounds that come with being in the city at night. It felt good to finally leave my bedroom and experience the world again. Over the following week, I gradually worked myself up to full speed again. By the end of November I felt essentially normal. I still carried the shades to work, but I didn’t wear them. I could watch basketball games without any concern about aggravating my brain. And most of all, I could write again.
Feeling fully recovered, I started to ramp up my workload. I started writing for a Raptors site. I wrote a number of articles in a row for a clickbait site, in order to get a payout reward for writing so many in such a short span. After that, I began hunting around for more writing work. I was focused on building my resume up, all while working four days a week at my restaurant job. I felt newly refreshed, and I put pressure on myself to try to achieve as much as I possibly could as a writer in the shortest possible time frame. And it worked for a while. I learned how to handle multiple assignments a week. I planned my time around writing. I’ve never been a particularly organized person, but my weekly schedule became more regimented.
But then one day about three weeks ago I got to a Thursday morning (which was my first shift of the week – I work in an industry where Thurs-Sun shifts are the norm). I realized that I was feeling more tired than usual. I turned my girlfriend and said, “I’m exhausted. I think I really need to take it easy this weekend.” She pointed out that if I was serious about taking it easy, I shouldn’t be working. I shrugged the comment off, figuring that doing my best to not overly strain myself that weekend would be sufficient. I could rest on Monday. I got through my four days, but by Sunday I was absolutely burnt out. I was asked to stay a couple of hours extra on Sunday to close the store, and I realized I simply couldn’t do it. My head was getting all muddled up. I was too tired to do anything – even the most basic tasks at work. I started making mistakes on the line – little mistakes, like skipping a burger or missing a modification on an order. The other supervisor agreed to close for me and I left early – still thinking that a bit of rest was all I needed.
I rested for three days, but by Wednesday I knew something was wrong – I couldn’t go into work. So it was back to the doctor, and another week spent resting, almost as if the concussion had returned full force. My head began throbbing in exactly the same way it had when I had my initial concussion – just waves of exhaustion and confusion pouring over me. At one point we ordered food for delivery and the trip from the couch to the front door to collect the food was so exhausting that by the time I got back to the living room I needed to lie down. Staring at a computer screen for longer than 5 minutes was overwhelming. After a week, I still felt messed up, so I returned to the doctor and explained my situation. She agreed that I’d been overdoing it, and simply needed to stop working so hard. In short, she told me that I would need to choose between my writing work and the restaurant job that pays the bills, at least in the short term.
Since that doctor visit, I’m feeling a lot better. I’m starting to watch my basketball games instead of listen to them again. I can check the internet when I need to. I’m no longer curled on the couch with my head in my hands. In other words, I’m functional. But I’m still not normal. I still get home from work at 2 AM and sleep till noon. I still need to take fifteen minutes to relax every few hours. I haven’t watched a single movie in probably a month. Going forward, I’ve scaled back my writing commitments – informing two of the sites that I was writing for that I needed to take an indefinite hiatus. Another site I plan to return to tomorrow, but only with a very reduced workload. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the past few months, it’s that head injuries are nothing to take lightly.
Between Sarah’s baby, and my head injury, the progress on this book certainly isn’t what either of us expected it to be a year ago – or even six months ago. Life comes at you fast. Goals are great, but sometimes real life gets in the way, and between both of our physical situations, I don’t think either of us are in a position to push as hard as we’d like on this book right now. But Sleeping With The Material World is our child and it will persevere even if its parents neglect it. We will get this book finished…eventually.
-Simon
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