Five Years After

 When I started this blog, it was to set things down that I didn't really want to tell people. But the following is stuff I would very much like to tell somebody, but no one wants to hear it.

Five years ago today—August 30, 2020—I lost consciousness, collapsed, and hit my head firmly on the parking lot of the west Pasadena Smart and Final. The receiving doctor at Huntington Memorial told Lydia he did not expect me to live through the night because my brain was bleeding badly; but I did make it. 

Along the long road of recovery, Lydia would sometimes say, as a way of getting me to count my blessings and put things in the proper perspective, that I was (I'm paraphrasing) fortunate to have survived.

The response I usually wanted to make but never did was: Did I survive, really? This was an honest question. It really wasn't until about February of 2024 that I at last was convinced that I did, that I would when finished healing be my old self again.

Mentally. Internally. In these aspects, I am my old self. Physically, nope. No sense of smell, which results in not much sense of taste. I completely lost my singing voice for a long time, but that does seem to be coming back slowly. But I don't want to get sidetracked here.

What I seem to have lost is my connection to people. That is not the old Rob. But that is due to the way people relate to me. And that may be a result of my brain injury; I don't really know, and no one will help me with that question.

I seem to have lost my ability to engage people in conversation. I used to be able to interest people in what I had to say. I can't do that anymore. No one, including Lydia, really listens attentively to me. Now, it is true that she is still interested, but not for long. She always interrupts me now, every time. I can only conclude that this is because I fail to maintain her interest, and her mind thus wanders, as it does; her mind is quite active at all times.

This may sound self-pitying, but I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe that I am only looking at the hard facts. If I cannot interest people in what I am saying, it must be my fault.

A big problem is my still erratic memory. A while back, we were over at Joe Rinaudo's, and I found myself surrounded by people with whom I shared a keen interest in the history of 20th Century musical and filmic creations. And these people were willing to listen to me, but I could not remember anything of what I wanted to say. It was a humiliating experience.

I have managed to maintain a long correspondence with my old best friend Blake, the smartest person I know, and that is encouraging. I am still in here somewhere, and Blake brings that out. 

But the other person with whom I have regular converse, Nik, evinces absolutely no interest in anything I have to say. My only value to him, it seems, is as an audience to his weekly monologues and occasional soliloquies. And when, last week, I put up a bit of resistance to this, he became annoyed and more or less told me to shut the hell up.

The result of all this is that I have pretty much lost the drive to communicate, which is a huge loss for me. Not that I have really lost the desire to do this; it's just that I don't see much sense in trying anymore. It just seems like a big waste of time and energy.

I desperately need help with this. I need people to listen to me, to help me through this. But perhaps it is just that they don't have the patience to wait for me to get my thoughts out, which can be quite a struggle.

What hurts, frankly, is that no one cares enough to be patient with me, when that is what I would do if the situations were reversed. I have always tried to be in service to all who need me, and I more often than not am true to this aim. But it does not seem to be valued by anyone anymore.

And so I find myself once again asking the question: did I survive, really?

Where I'm At

After I almost died as a result of losing consciousness suddenly and landing head-first on the concrete of the Smart and Final parking lot—the attending physician told Lydia he didn't expect me to last through the night—I was in the hospital over a month. I recorded no memories of most of that period, although I was interactive much of that time. If I did not have evidence that I was interactive during that time (I took a brief video a week before I regained awareness), I might not believe that I really was interactive during that time, because I have absolutely no memories at all of that period, and no sense of the passage of time. When I did regain consciousness on 9-27-20, I thought it was the morning of 8-31-20, the day after I fell.

Since that day, I have struggled mightily to return to the status quo ante. For most of the time, I was concerned that I would never return to full brain function. At this point, I believe that I will, as least as far as capacity to reason and think critically are concerned. I, however, suspect that I will never be the same person that I was before the accident again. 

When she senses my difficulty in coping with my many physiological problems, Lydia eventually resorts to saying, "Well, at least you survived." My immediate thought has been, "Did I?"

I'm going to write about the events of the period after I returned home from the hospital on my other blog, but here I want to talk about where I am now regarding my brain's condition.

Several months ago, I reached a condition where I felt that I had finally gotten my head above water. Up till then, I really was unaware of the passage of time. I was constantly in the moment, not looking forward or backward. Looking back, the whole of 2023 seems to have passed in a month, and I can't really place anything that happened correctly on my internal timeline. Then, one day, that fog lifted and I felt that I was finally firing on all cylinders. 

For the next month or two, I went through a period of constant changes in brain function. For a few days I would be fine, able to write, my memory working well, Then for a few days I found I could not remember names. Then, a few days where I could remember names, but I couldn't write to save my life. I struggled with a short text message. Then, I couldn't remember words; they just wouldn't be there, and I would be stalled in the middle of a sentence. Then I'd be fine for a few days. 

At this point, I should discuss my physical issues. My sense of smell slowly disappeared a few years back, and now I can't even smell skunk scent. After the accident, my speaking voice was a mere buzz that I couldn't really modulate, and I could only sing a few notes, an octave at best. As far as doctors have been able to determine, there is no physical damage to account for these losses.

Returning to the time when I came out of that fog I mentioned, My voice did show marked improvement. During the period when my brain function kept changing, one of the changes was that at one point, my voice appeared to be returning to normal, especially the singing voice. At this point, my singing voice has nearly disappeared, but I can modulate my speaking voice to a certain extent. When I'm reading to Lydia, I can change my voice somewhat to indicate different characters, which I could not do at all for a long time.

November 7, 2022, I had my second lens implant procedure. The anesthesia did not go well, and in fact was ineffective. I was completely awake during the procedure, and felt what was going on in my eye. It took all I had in me to take that without moving, thus facing down terror as I never had before. 

Yay for me and all that, but immediately afterwards I started taking on weight in my belly area at an alarming rate. No one seemed to be concerned about that, no matter what I said, until I reached 240 pounds, 60 pounds over normal. Then my doctor noticed. Her assumption was more or less that I had been eating badly, but really, my food intake at worst would account for a 10-pound gain under normal circumstances. And for much of that time, I was on a strict diet. I did manage to halt the gain, but not more than that.

My doctor then put me on Monjaro, a new drug that should address my weight problem with time. Right now I am at 234, which is a decent loss from my peak weight, but I have a long way to go.

Let me sum up the way I see my brain condition. Imagine my brain is a land mass, with the various brain functions, at least those concerned with memory, reasoning, and motor functions, little towns spread out over that land mass. By my judgment, each one of these little towns has checked in, and each is capable of proper function. 

The problem now seems to be the highways connecting these towns to each other and to my consciousness. My remaining brain injury seems to be along these highways. This would seem to explain my erratic brain function. What I believe is happening now is that my brain has Caltrans out re-routing all these highways around the damaged synapses. Thus, when I reach for a word and it isn't there, the word is stalled in front of a "Road Closed" sign, waiting for the Caltrans workers to open up a lane.

Now, let's go to a different analogy. The memory section of my brain is a big desktop PC with a bunch of hard drives. This PC has recently been upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 11, which has for some reason known only to Microsoft thrown a number of these hard drives offline. My brain has been working nonstop to bring these drives back online, and when one of these drives containing long-term memory comes back online, every memory on the disk is dumped into my short-term memory, making these now ancient memories fresh in my mind, which distorts my brain's timeline badly until my brain can put these memories back into their proper place. This process is extremely disruptive, and cripplingly tiring.

The bottom line is this: while what I am going through is very good, indicating that my brain has reached the final stages of healing, it is also giving me a terribly bumpy ride, one that I cannot consciously control. My only choice is to buckle up and submit to the ride, wherever it leads. From one day to the next, I never know what situation I am going to have to deal with. One moment I am deeply depressed and hardly able to stand up, the next moment I am highly motivated and full of hope. 

One thing that never changes, however, is the sense of a pressing need to communicate, to tell someone what I am going through. Unfortunately, I have no one who is willing to sit and listen to me talk about it. And I mean no one. Not even Lydia. Not that I blame her. I can be very tough to take in my highly unstable condition.

The easiest, and probably the most constructive, way to handle this is simply to be patient and wait passively for things to straighten out, But I can't do that. We have so much on our plates now, she needs be to be productive, to do my share of things. I am thus left to keep my thoughts to myself, and struggle to be as productive as I can manage under the conditions. Which is not very productive at all. Which is terribly frustrating and enervating. 

Most of the time I feel as if I were caught in a crashing ocean wave which is tossing me around violently and pulling me out to sea. While my best course is to let the wave have its way with me, waiting until it is done to swim back to shore, what I have to do is to struggle impotently against the wave, which never really seems to work.

I realize that I have now thrown out a badly mixed metaphor, but there it is. On one level, I must submit to what is happening to me, and on another I must struggle constantly against it. 

This is why I cannot remain the same person I have been. I must change fundamentally, because things are not working. The old Hell House motto is Adapt or Die, and that is pretty much the choice that faces me. I have no intention of dying, so I must adapt. But it's hard to adapt to conditions that are constantly changing. I can only hope and pray that my brain finishes its healing process soon, so I know what I have to work with going forward.

Let me give an example of what I am talking about. For a long time, my goal for our retirement years was to get back to musical performance, as a singer. But that goal at this point seems unattainable now. Perhaps my voice talents will come back to me, but if they don't I need a new set of goals. But I can't do that until I know what remains possible for me to attain. At this point, I have no idea what that may be.

Alone

Well, I haven't had to come here for some time, but here I am. Before me is some sort of operation. I HATE operations. I've worked scrupulously my whole life to avoid them.

But I was born with a bicuspid valve, so I can avoid an operation no longer.

The only option available to one in my position has long been open-heart surgery. Now, thanks to the advance of medicine, there is a far less invasive option, the TAVR procedure, that may be available to me if I can qualify for a study. But either way, I have to have it done, more or less, now.

Now, this is an existential threat. But as such things go, it is the mildest sort of existential threat.

And yet, I am terrified. And horrified.

As I write, I expect that within the next week I will either be done with the TAVR procedure, or setting up the other option. And I find that I have no one to whom I can talk unreservedly. Not just about this present situation, but about whatever is uppermost in my mind.

I don't think I am merely feeling sorry for myself. What I am feeling, more than fear, is solitude.

I was just trying to talk to my wife about an unrelated, and I thought safe, subject. And I saw her face harden.

Wow, that hurt.

My best friend, by an unfortunate coincidence, is out of town. Other friends are keeping me at arm's length. Still other friends are choosing now to be sheep regarding Facebook.

And I have no one with whom I may be frank, or even free-associating. No one who is willing to listen to whatever I have to say with equanimity, and without prejudice.

A harsh indictment of me. I quite obviously don't rate, even among my closest confreres.

And so I am submerged in sadness. Short of breath. I feel I am in narrow straits, acutely needful of companionship, and profoundly deficient in it.

I guess it's true that we enter and exit this world alone.

Mr. Spencer's Neighborhood

Here I am again, on my Easter Egg blog, expressing ideas unsafe to express to anyone in my actual life. This is the blog where I talk to myself, safe in the knowledge that no one is interested in what I have to say.

In tonight's post, I will talk about communication.

Communication has been my motive force lo these many years.

Ooh, dramatic one-sentence paragraphs.

There's the effing critic stomping on my expression again. Well, fie on him. No one is reading this anyway.

Anyway, my upbringing was like a good thrashing in a riptide, leaving me far from shore, trying to find my way back home after ripping my glasses off me and leaving me blind. I am trying not to whine; I am trying rather to describe where I was post-puberty. 16 years old.

At Sweet 16, I had spent the past four years in an Osterizer of having everything I had been brought up to believe having been pureed and frapped. Accent grave on the appropriate E's.

Stubbornly enough, I continued to stick to everything I had been brought up to believe, because I had thought that all through, and nothing had popped up to compel me to diverge from it.

Here's the thing. I was surrounded by those who felt compelled to explain everything, and I was unwilling to explain what I could not explain logically. What I could not explain logically, I had to take on faith.

When I made that decision not to "outdrive my lights," I suddenly found myself on a pretty lonely path.

And pretty lonely I have been since. At times I have found those who seem to admire me for my choice of path, and one who even loves me for it.

And yet, I have never found anyone else following me on that path. But I have been advised that I may not remark upon that fact, or I will be labeled a martyr.

And THAT is the problem in talking about oneself, and that is why I don't like to do it to others. If I should happen miraculously to strike a vein of truth that serves to justify my choice of path, it will invariably be labeled as self-serving.

Yeah, OK, that is pretty much the definition of a martyr. So maybe the label fits.

So maybe my contribution is no greater than my existence.

So never mind my initial point.

Oy

I have a giant floater in my right eye that effectively kills my ability to do anything independently of others. I am even having trouble typing. My opto tells me to deal with it.

Waah.

Species argument

Cats see only your good points. Dogs may love you more unconditionally, but they are more attentive of your bad side, and they never forget it when they see it. But cats say, "It's cool," and move on, unless you really are an a-hole. More than anything, I sincerely try not to be an a-hole.

As carnivores and unapologetic predators, cats understand a dark side is not a defining one. And, yes, I have a dark side. Only dark in outlook, mind you; I am as gentle a soul in action as was my father. I suppose I can't help being a bit of a predator myself. But I see the bad things, and I predate against them. I know I may be wrong in my judgment, and that's what stops my decisive, rhetorical coup de grace. Usually.

People say of cats they like, "They are very dog-like." I consider myself neutral on the cat/dog axis, or on the cat/dog/human/sentient being axis. I judge the beer in the glass.

Hey, did you know I was a Certified beer judge?

But the greatest dog I've known, Lucky the Second, was catlike in his acceptance of the extremes of my behavior. He took a long time to judge me, but once he judged me thumbs-up, I was aces to him. He wanted to be by my side 24/7, my wing man, my sidekick.

I've loved a lot of estimable dogs and look forward acutely to meeting them all at Rainbow Bridge, but I've never met the likes of Lucky before or since, and don't expect to. With him, I could do no wrong. When I sang, he got happy, and he always wanted to be by my side. When he passed, I sensed that he was THE dog of my life, and so far that has held true.

I miss Lucky the Second every day of my life.

If I am a very lucky man, there may be more such dogs, but as watchful as I am for them, I don't expect it. Our current dogs are attentive to me, but Lydia is the center of their universe. She deserves that with all of our pets, because she IS that. All beings gravitate towards her; her goodness is a center of gravity.

But I am an acquired taste with every living thing, like haggis or Lightning Smith. When a sentient being actually gravitates towards me, like Lydia or Lucky or most cats, it touches me deeply. I am grateful, sincerely so, because it is so rare, and its rare encouragement keeps me going.

But the surprise at meeting any creature that takes to me never diminishes. I have too much perspicacity, and too much experience, for it to be otherwise. As Jean Shepherd put it, I am the blind date. I am the Bride of Frankenstein.

Is there anyone remaining who gets that reference?

Mission Statement

So if you are reading this, you are either me or a really nosy person.

Yeah, just kidding about that second part of the last sentence. No one reads this but me. This blog is about my getting stuff out of my system without burdening others. And by "others", I mean Wifey.

You see, I'd like to be entirely sanguine about life in general, in all its aspects. In fact, I strive to be. I also strive to be perfect. I am equally successful at both efforts.

And by "successful", I mean comprehensively unsuccessful.

I strive to be perfect because, as they used to exhort us to do in Driver Education, I "aim high in steering." I figure the best way for me to get as close as I can to perfect is to aim directly at it.

It has been my personal Hell my whole life to be dark when my soul wants to be bright white. Well, "wants" is the wrong verb. What I mean is that my central sin is my inability viscerally to embrace the blinding goodness that is central to our existence.

I believe in God. I believe a volitional higher power created us, and that this higher power is Christian. I believe in the Holy Trinity.

But I don't buy into any current Christian dogma. I'd passionately, desperately love to buy into Catholicism, because Lydia finds sublime comfort in it, and I find sublime comfort in her.

But she is much smarter than I. And I am stubborn.

I believe that God put us here with the analogue of a compass, a canteen of water and some hardtack. He gave us what we needed to thrive, and to find our way back to Him. In this analogy, the compass is our intellect, which is limited by the imperfection of our direct perception.

What I mean by "the imperfection of our direct perception" may best be described thusly: imagine your left hand submerged in 78-degree water, and your right hand submerged in 100-degree water. Now imagine then plunging both of your hands in 89-degree water. You, if you have an accurate imagination, will anticipate that simultaneously one of your hands will interpret that the water is cold, and the other that the very same water is warm.

Our direct perception of our condition is limited by the context in which we perceive it. Also limited by this is our logic.

Faith exists beyond this limit. In some degree, so does hope.

Ever driven at night? Then you know that your speed at night is limited by what your headlights illuminate. Irrespective of how powerful your motor is or how well your car handles, you cannot safely drive faster than what the evidence presented by your headlights indicates. Or, to put it in the common argot, "You can't outdrive your headlights."

Similarly, you can't expect your logic to be effective beyond the limits of your perception.

In my Christian-without-portfolio existence, the realm of faith is between the limits of our perception and the extent of our existence. To put it another way, faith bridges the gap between what we understand and what we experience.

Hey, I'm doing the best I can.