Artists who survived brain injuries but found a new craft | Hacker News Reader

Artists who survived brain injuries but found a new craft

bbc.co.uk

39 pointsheadmelted22 comments

I'm a brain injury survivor, I was hit by a driver running a red at >40mph. It's so important to have stories like this out there. It's a condition that is complex, individual and often hard to explain to the people in your life. Beyond the physical tells, my resulting mood disorder became intertwined with concentration problems that seriously inhibited my path to recovery.

I developed a cannabis addiction and when my lawsuit settled virtually everyone I knew, including members of my family, became so jealous of my windfall that my support network disappeared. My depression only deepened. I studied psychology part time in university and slowly recovered. Not working for 5 years though completely turned my group of friends, who also come from a blue collar background, against me. My efforts to wear a smile and share my wealth only tainted things further as they became convinced I was just a lazy lottery winner. People most willing to spend time with me and smoke my weed became the most eager to shame me among others.

I now medicate with the help of a doctor and his drugs work much better. I'm in a supportive relationship and although many people from those days still fail to understand my condition, I've mostly cut them from my life.

I also make art as therapy, I purchased a couple analog synthesizers and get great benefits out of a session of designing and recording sound. It's really a great art form for geeks looking for something outside visual art. You can create very complex signal paths when feeling ambitious or just experiment with some knob twisting and random plugging. Both methods have about the same success rate as far as interesting sound creation goes. Former cannabis users will get great satisfaction as they overcome the problem of music feeling dull outside of intoxication.

> I'm a brain injury survivor, ... It's a condition that is complex, individual and often hard to explain to the people in your life.

yeah, it's complicated...

I knocked myself out at the lake when I was 17, and have almost complete amnesia for about 2 weeks. I spent 10 days under observation in the hospital, but only remember a brief moment when the friend whose personal watercraft I was riding came to visit (hit my chin on the handlebars -> knocked out). He brought my brother too, and my mom stayed with me in the hospital, but I never had any memories of them or anything else at the hospital.

Retrograde Amnesia is when memories stop before an injury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_amnesia

I slept-walked through the first quarter of my senior year of high school... I remember once asking a question of my aunt (whom I was living with, for attending that school), then realizing that I'd just asked the same question a moment before.

I went for a followup with the neurologist who'd followed me in the hospital, and asked him about the double-vision. He said that I'd stunned the nerve that goes to the muscle that pulls my left eye to the left, and that it should get better with time, and all my other symptoms should get better with time, and that there wasn't much that "medicine" could do to speed my recovery.

Sure enough, as more weeks passed I found that I could 'direct' my 'lazy' left eye to pull left, and collapse my double-vision into one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabismus

Eventually the double vision was only when I was tired.As the neurologist predicted, by about six months post-injury my double vision was mostly resolved. There were still stutters when I used my eyes eyes to track things, but this wasn't really noticeable, and I'd probably always had difficulties with eye tracking. For example, I was never able to hit a baseball very well, possibly because I couldn't follow it from the pitcher's hand...

I'd still get headaches when I wore sandals, so I didn't wear sandals anymore.

Then I went off to college, where I soon developed an undefined nerve condition. It was triggered by the new laptop, but really this was just a 'spark' that lit the 'kindling' prepared by the head injury a year before. The first 3 doctors I went to were dismissive - they saw a skinny 18-year old who just needed to exercise a little.

The early internet convinced me that I had "carpal tunnel syndrome", but that's characterized by numbness, and my nerves were just inflamed. Later slashdot and other sites convinced me that I had a 'Repetitive Strain Injury', but nothing helped.

I didn't want to go back to 'teh college' after my first year (it was very expensive), but my dad said "just get your degree, then you can do what you want." I was (still) good at school, figured I could get out in 2.5 years, and I didn't know what else I'd do anyways. Retrospectively, the piece of paper (degree) hanging on my dad's wall isn't worth what he paid for it, but he likes it I guess...

Post-college I vowed to figure out the inflammation that I experienced all the time. I worked for a restaurant that my father was invested in for a couple years, then I helped take care of my grandmother during her brief cancer experience. My aunt paid well - she basically paid for appointments with a very good doctor who helped release a lot of the the physical trauma I'd incurred at the lake, 7 or 8 years before. Got married, went to work for my father for another 2 years, then my 'loony' wife wanted to move 2 hours away... (we were married for 2 years, 2 weeks 5 days, and ~20 hours. We get along much better now that we're not married anymore, and she's now much more stable than she was when I met her. I guess her business is starting to take off...)

I worked at an amazon warehouse for the 2011 holiday season [1]. It was the first and only "real job" ('employee' at a non-family business) I've ever had. About a month after I was dismissed, I saw an ad on Craigslist for the local taxi company, and remembered the time that I had to call that cab company for a ride. (This will be covered in 'Taxi Wars: A New Hope', when I get around to writing it...)

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/

Taxi driving was awesome because there was no boss. The money wasn't always great, but it was enough to get by while I tried to finish figuring out my little health condition.

I got wrapped up taking care of some of my passengers. The "Who are your Lifelines" guy [2] completely depleted my meager savings. It wasn't just him, though - I was sent a regular stream of people who needed more than just a ride...

[2] http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/

Anyways... yeah, head injuries are complicated. I didn't get any artistic abilities, but maybe I became more empathic. By any objective measure, I'm still sort of dysfunctional now. And if it weren't for the support of my father, I'd still be driving a taxi going nowhere quickly. But I have other websites with products for sale (HN is not a target market), and in the last few months I've figured enough out to feel confident enough to promote (advertising/etc)...

(some minor edits - formatting, clarifications, etc)

Thanks for sharing your story.

Holly, shit, that sounds like my life. After my accident I also started to abuse drugs. Stopped, recovered. Finished a tough education. Make now good money. Friends are also kinda oissy (except the poorest one) (stopped looong ago now like twenty years now) but i wonder if there is some kind of correlation between brain injuries and drug abuse?

Oh yeah, drug abuse is a common thing to come across in TBI support groups. Executive functioning and self regulation issues, frontal lobe stuff and impulse control. It's where the TBI people go Venn diagram with the ADD/ADHD people.

You think add/adhd existed before the tbi and the accident made it worse and the drug abuse is a way you try to control it?

Definitely a possibility. Without testing from before an accident its a bit of a guessing game with anecdotal evidence from family members.

But yeah, based off my experience I can totally see how a smart kid with ADD that floated through the system would find a tbi suddenly making previous obstacles into show stoppers. Same with depression. When your executive functioning takes a hit you are now operating without the full feature set.

These things do tend to play off each other and it's easy to start pilling disorders up once you've got a few biggies. My doctors generally tried to pull me away from playing a labeling game. Studying psychology during my recovery had me basically diagnosing myself with new stuff every term. Instead we worked towards pragmatic goals of reestablishing my concentration, healthy sleeping and impulse regulation.

It occurs to me now that living in Canada perhaps made the process of arranging specialists easier.

> oissy

Is that regional slang? It's a great sounding word.

What synths do you have? Sounds like you have some modular.

There's a great documentary about Frank Frazetta called Painting with Fire. Later in life he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right hand. He taught himself to paint and draw again with his left.

This sounds like an ad from the radio in GTA V for lobotomies as a way of removing any existential angst you may be suffering from.

The headline chosen by the BBC does not sit well with me. "Take my brain out" feels very click bait-y, and maybe even slightly exploitative. "I take my brain out and recharge it" is the snippet of that quote in context.

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