Photo of traumatic brain damage on Wikipedia (Photograph by James Heilman MD)
As I write this, it is Saturday morning. I know that for a fact.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, I had been in bed with flu since early on Tuesday evening. I reckon it was about 66 hours of dozing with occasional, inevitable gettings-up to do the necessaries, including three baths.
Yesterday, I got up on principle and stayed up most of the day. I had an e-mail exchange with a friend:
ME: Slightly better. Brain vaguely working.
HER: I know what you mean, I had it last week. The one positive aspect is you really appreciate it when you’re over it and suddenly – Hallelujah! – you are lucid again and can do things!
ME: At my age, that’s unlikely to happen…
HER (aged 53): Well it’s interesting you said that because I wondered last week, maybe I’ve reached an age where you have to be grateful you do get over these things. Imagine if you never get that feeling of being with-it again and remain forever without-it.
Today’s Daily Express headline seems a little unlikely to be true
I knew what she meant. After I got hit by a truck in 1991 and, in falling, hit the back of my head on the corner of a brick wall, the concussion effect seemed to last about nine months, coming and going without warning.
There was no NHS aftercare, of course.
When the concussion was there, I would come home, look at the wall or mindlessly at the TV and not be able to form even simple thoughts.
It was as if I could feel nerve endings trying to link up with each other, like hands trying to reach out to each other but failing… and the thoughts were unable to form in my mind. I would just stare at the wall or at the TV, able to comprehend the TV’s words and pictures but unable to think.
I figured it was a flash-forward to senility.
Yesterday, I mindlessly watched the second half of what appeared to be a slightly-out-of-focus science fiction movie – perhaps it had been shot in 16mm and transferred too many times – and an entire episode of Hogan’s Heroes.
Neither is ever to be advised nor a good sign of mental lucidity.
Inevitably, I looked up my old e-diaries in search of an easy blog for today.
I found these three entries in 2003.
THURSDAY 23rd JANUARY
I talked to Xxxx Yyyy (a comedian then in his fifties who is still alive). He said: “Someone told me the only important things in life are sex and death. But, after 50, the sex isn’t so important – it’s all death, death, death.”
FRIDAY 24th JANUARY
Yesterday, I went to an Italian funeral in Mill Hill. There was traffic chaos getting there and then, at the cemetery, the hole had not been dug big enough for the coffin.
SATURDAY 25th JANUARY
My mother told me ex-weatherman Ian McCaskill had been on TV saying he used to present the TV weather forecasts wearing no shoes, because they electronically affected the cameras. I could not decide if she was doolally, he was doolally or reality was doolally.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 