flamingsword | brain damaged - no, literally (Reply)

Sorry I haven't been online and keeping up with the flist. I've been catching up with a few long-lost friends and doing upkeep things in the real world. But fear not: my LiveJournal obsession is alive and healthy.
To save having to have this conversation with several people, I'm just putting it here. It's kind of embarrassing, but it needs doing. Questions are welcomed, but for once I am going to give the touchy-subject warning. For serious: no teasing me about this, or I will be interesting to you. In the Chinese fashion.

Medical link to back me up.
Most types of brain damage are actually fixable, but here's the catch: you're starting from zero. Your brain can take the cells that were meant to control one area and make them multi-purpose, but you're starting from infancy on a timeline towards whatever it is you lost. It takes a year or two to learn to speak again if you lose it, because that's how long it took when you were a baby. The process is no less complicated even if you have done it before. It's not like riding a bike. You didn't forget it, the bits of you that could do it died.

The things I lost were partial manual coordination, large chunks of memory, and the ability to reliably transfer personal experiences from short-term to long-term memory. I don't remember second grade, or the first half of third. I don't remember most of 1989, or the first year of junior high, except the really emotionally charged pieces. Anything that I didn't overthink to death, I ignored and it never made it past the short-term to long-term gap. Books and scientific data get stored differently and weren't affected. Let's take a moment of reflection on how I turned out geeky. ;)

I eventually started practicing memory-sharpening techniques, and I have a pretty good recall of events in my adult life, but it takes me a long time to sort them chronologically. That part of my brain is broken - completely. And if I think back to the same memory later, I'll have to re-figure out where it goes in time sequence, because it doesn't stay put. I don't think that's ever coming back, it would have fixed itself by now if it were. If you've ever wondered why it takes a while for me to remember what year something happened or whether I had a given conversation with you or with someone else, this is why. It's also one of the reasons I study the workings of the brain and the mind, to see where the overlap is and where it isn't. It took a long time to get a handle on what was coming from where, what was going to get better and what wasn't, and what was and wasn't my fault or someone else's.

It feels good, stable, to have it sorted out.