This is what my husband says to me all the time, especially when I am feeling down. This might be the hardest post I've ever written. But not because of content. On August 25 a fistula in my brain decided it couldn't take the pressure any more and let loose. A fistula is an abnormal growth, in my case an artery and a vein grew together when they clearly should not. In hindsight there were symptoms that I wrote off. Like pervasive tinnitus in my ears that turns out was me hearing the blood collecting... But I work in a noisy place and wrote it off. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't worry about it happening to you, because it is extremely rare. This fistula has caused me nothing but grief since then! Some things are permanent and others are not. In the not permanent category falls some of the more annoying things. Like problems with my executive functioning. This is things like problem solving, organizing your thoughts, understanding complex issues... all the stuff that makes you a fully functioning adult. I still have trouble route finding which is compounded by my vision issues which I will get to later. My ability to put things into long term memory is getting better, which I think no one is happier to see than my husband who referred to me as 10 second Tom for awhile, and he got tired of hearing the same story over and over and over again. This is why the blog post is hard for me. Trying to organize my thoughts into something coherent for others to read is challenging. This is the first time I wrote it out on paper before I came to the computer. All these things should still get better, that my tiredness too. I sleep appropriately 12-14 hours a day, when you count my naps. This is because my brain is so busy healing, it takes most of my energy. But all of that should get better.
Permanently I have damage to my vision centre in my brain. My right vision centre is severely damaged, if not completely. Strangely this does not mean that I am blind in my left eye like one might expect. I have lost all my peripheral vision on my left side. In both eyes. Brains are weird. In addition the quality of my vision has changed. It seems darker to me all the time, putting on sunglasses in the bright sunshine makes almost no difference to what I see but I can feel the difference on my eyes. I don't know if that makes sense or not. In bright daylight is seems darker, I don't squint. My ability to see detail as quickly is gone. If I stop and pause I can see it, but in normal vision I miss things all the time. This won't come back. But I am learning to adjust. I turn my head to the left to scan for things I might be missing, and I take more time when reading and writing to make sure that I am noticing all the things I need to. This will not get better, but I will learn to adjust and it will eventually seem normal.
It is time for a nap, this made me very tired, and was hard work. I was going to write about how yoga impacted my recovery so far, but that will be saved for another day. My bed is calling. Hopefully I didn't tell the same story over and over again, and it made some sort of sense.
As a side note, I am not teaching yoga for awhile. I need to heal this mess and sleep. I hope you all understand. I will be back. Later.
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