The Pants Method

Like many brain injury patients, I take a lot of drugs. These are all prescription drugs, mind you, and my neurologist insists I need every dose of every medication.

How many? No idea. Stay here and I’ll count. (While you’re waiting, I’ll give you a topic: “Former SNL player Mike Myers’ character Linda Richmond was hilarious.” Discuss.)

And we’re back. As of this typing, there are five pills in the morning, four (vitamins mostly) and an anti-osteoporosis injection at midday, 11 pills before bed and a final one in the middle of the night when I wake up to pee.

Sorry, oversharing comes with the territory. If you’re still reading, I guess that’s okay with you. If not, no big whoop, as Linda Richmond would say. We’ll get together, we’ll have coffee, we’ll talk.

Anyhoo, it’s that overnight dose that brings me to the actual topic of this post, the Pants Method.

As you might imagine, I have trouble with my memory, what with the brain injury, so I often give myself weird little reminders of who’s who, what’s what, etc.

In this case, there’s a pill that boosts my lagging level of thyroid hormone, and it is not to be taken within—what? A couple of hours? Maybe less?—of foods containing calcium.

Well, I not only tolerate lactose, I adore it, so it only makes sense(?) to swallow that pill when I inevitably wake up for my middle-of-the-night potty party.

Before I hit on my Pants Method (patent pending forever), I sometimes would be uncertain the next morning whether I’d taken the drug or not.

Couldn’t I simply count the pills, you may ask, maybe purchase a separate pill divider for that prescription? Sure, those sound like great ideas, now that I’ve just had them.

Too late! The Pants Method is in my routine, and routine is a super-important helper for brain injury patients.

The method is simple: When I wake up in the middle of the night, the first thing I do is take off my pajama pants. (Actually that’s the second thing. First I have to slither out of my CPAP headset.)

Next, I pick up the travel-size container from my bedside and give it a shake to make sure I haven’t already taken the pill. I ingest my final med of the day in the bathroom with a swig of water and take care of business. Then it’s a quick wash of the hands and back to bed, husband and CPAP.

Genius, am I right?

Well, it was bitterly cold overnight last night, and I had apparently tried to put my PJ pants back on while lying in bed, ending up with both heavily socked feet in one pant leg before falling back to sleep.

This morning I gave my pill container a panicked shake.

Empty. Whew.

My husband asked me what was wrong.

“I thought I forgot to take my thyroid pill, but now I remember taking my pants off, so it’s okay,” I told him.

I don’t know if I should be mad that he didn’t know what I was talking about or happy that we both ended up laughing.

Creativity Now!

I swiped the title of this piece from George Costanza’s father, Frank, of TV’s “Seinfeld,” who’d end his ridiculous shouting matches with wife Estelle by throwing his hands in the air and shouting, “Serenity now!” Maybe the “serenity” part had started as a soothing mantra, but these were the hilariously batty and antagonistic Costanzas, so no serenity for them.

Continue reading “Creativity Now!” →

Rocky

Just over a mile from our house stands a steep hill topped by a boulder in the shade of an oak tree. Back in my pre-brain injury days a decade ago, I’d get up early and go for a run before work, ending it with the zigzagging terrain of what I called The Mountain. I also had a name for the boulder: Rocky, which I’d sit on to catch my breath and take in the view–the lake, the woods and, at that hour, no people.

Then I’d walk home to start my day. At that time I was a regional editor at a suburban Chicago newspaper, so my job involved a lot of sitting, typing and fretting—pretty much like any job, now that I think about it. Those runs energized me for more than work. There was also the usual stuff of life—housework, grocery shopping, dinner prep and shuttling our daughter between school and gymnastics.

It was one of those nights after practice that The Accident changed our lives. I drove to the gym and had our daughter, who was 15 and on her learner’s permit, drive us back. At a four-way stop three blocks from home, there was a crash. I have no memory of any of this, of course.

Thank God, I was the only one injured.

Continue reading “Rocky” →

Realigning My Ducks

Our former neurologist once told my husband: “Lisa will be fine as long as all her ducks are in a row” — in other words, as long as nothing threw me off my routines.

As a TBI/epilepsy patient since a 2008 car crash, hoo-boy, did I have my routines. Sample day: Wake up, take drugs, eat breakfast, read newspaper, exercise, shower/dress, eat lunch, nap, do minimal housework, have dinner/watch TV with husband, take drugs, sleep, take more drugs, go back to sleep.

This is not to say my life was completely predictable; there was also the occasional seizure.

In general, though, my ducks remained in a row.

Continue reading “Realigning My Ducks” →

Back to Where I Once Belonged

paul_and_john Music was a big part of my life growing up—piano lessons, church choir, band, theater—not to mention the songs playing nonstop in my head. That internal soundtrack is still going, but now I also have the fun lack of decorum that comes with traumatic brain injury, so I hum or sing along to my heart’s content. Where appropriate … usually.

By far my favorite group is the Beatles. It shames me to say that John Lennon’s murder on Dec. 8, 1980, was what sparked my interest in the Fab Four, but at 14 I was a little young to be a first-generation fan.

In college, this guy Ted, who would go on to become my husband, learned I had an encyclopedic knowledge of All Things Beatles. Even with other music, he noticed my lyrical memory was weirdly spot-on, even for songs I’d only heard coming from my siblings’ stereos or seen in songbooks. After 1993, when our daughter was born, I learned lots of “Barney & Friends” songs, sang her lullabies and helped her master the state capitals by singing them.

The Accident came years later, in September 2008. I emerged from a coma with moderate TBI and multiple broken bones and internal injuries, lucky to be alive. As cool as it would have been, though, I didn’t “wake up to the sound of music,” as in “Let It Be,” Paul McCartney’s ode to his mother. According to Ted, I once awoke in the hospital saying, in a robotic voice, “ERR-or. ERR-or,” and something like “01010101010.” I guess my brain was a computer, resetting itself. Or maybe that came from a repressed edition of “Lost in Space.”

Continue reading “Back to Where I Once Belonged” →

Follow Along, Won’t You?

Hello and welcome to my world. Back in 2008, that world shrank a little while the universe around me was expanding and speeding up. I’ve since gained insight into the power of my family’s love and the healing value of sheer stubbornness. Please join me as I share my travels through TBI life. Some stories will be amusing and some sad, but they will all be real.