Angela's Blog

Hey there.

Not too much news here but I'll try to conjure something worth writing about out of my awesome-ly uneventful life. I guess it might be interesting to talk about how I started my cognitive group yesterday at UW. It's all brain injured people meeting to learn about what challenges us cognitively and how to overcome it. I think it'll be pretty good. It was kind of weird though because there were only 3 of us in the class yesterday and both of the other people are old-time brain injured people. Not to say they're old but they've been brain injured a heck of a lot longer than me. One lady's been brain injured for 40 years! That wasn't a typo. 40 years! And the other guy's been brain injured for 10 years. And he's younger than me! Kinda makes me feel like a spring chicken.

Yesterday we talked about attention and distractions and how brain injury sort of turns off the filter in your brain that just tunes things out automatically. Pretty interesting. And illustrated perfectly when the fan came on in the room of speech therapy and it distracted me, I had to stop and acknowledge it, and then I had to make the conscious decision to ignore it. Stuff like that.

So I'm supposed to start a support group type class tomorrow that is for more brain injured people. It's a psychological, feeling type class where we talk about what's different now that we're brain injured, how that feels, and what to do with it now. I'm a little nervous about this one because what if I cry through the whole thing? I'm not much of a mushy, feeling person. I at least like to believe that I'm sort of tough and hardened. In reality, though, I'm like a big egg. I may be tough on the outside but that is a fragile exterior and I am pure mush on the inside. I just don't know if I want to show that to a bunch of people. People I do know I keep it from let alone people I don't know. The reassuring thing is that I at least got an outline of what we'll be discussing while in the cognitive class yesterday.

And I oh-so-gladly got my torture device re-fitted yesterday. That was irony in case you couldn't tell. I had a wonderful break from it post-surgery because it would have been over the stitches. I wore it last night and it killed. My elbow was crazy painful. At least it was a whole new kind of pain. Wasn't a metal-on-metal kind of pain anymore but actually a joint pain. Good but still not enjoyable. So I turned the tension down a little bit and I'll try it again tonight. I think if I ever find out if there was someone who did this to me I should make them wear one all the time and turn it up way too high. He he he - the evil peeks out.

Well, I think that's all I've got. Hope it wasn't too boring. If it was, too bad.

Bye.

Ang