Concussed

It's been a few weeks now since Corinna woke up in a dark alley with her bicycle on top of her. We went in to the ER that night, CAT scan came up clean, but her concussion symptoms were pretty severe.

Four days later, we were back at the ER because her head was hurting badly enough all our doctor friends worried she was bleeding internally. Nope, second CAT was clean, too. Still, she couldn't look at computer monitors, even her phone was problematic that way. Physical exertion, which is pretty much essential to her, made things worse, but mental exertion even more. Driving is problematic, work generally impossible.

All of which is normal concussion stuff, believe it or not. I think there's more awareness now than a few years ago, but how many employers would hold your job for six weeks while you recuperate from something that has no visible manifestation? Or more than six weeks, because you can't predict how long concussion symptoms will last. At least with my bypass surgery there is a fairly clear road map to recovery with defined benchmarks. And I have lengthy zippers on my arm and chest people can look at and think, 'Yeah, he's got a lot of recovering to do.'

I'm not sure they see that with the concussion. We have our 'retired' helmets hanging in our tomato garden as scarecrows along with a couple of retired model rockets. These things are retired as a result of crashes, the rockets because they took damage that was too much trouble to repair, the helmets because once they've done their job—taking an impact—they need to be replaced because the Styrofoam cracks. Looking at my retirees atop the tomato stakes, I think, there but for the grace of God go I.