I am celebrating my first brainiversary and honoring the journey of the past year. I cannot believe it has been a year already. I have so many emotions I am not sure how to feel. I do know that I feel strong and this changed me in ways I could never foresee.
I tend to think more of how Trevor must have felt this day last year. Taking me to the hospital, filling out the directive. Knowing that a craniotomy (brain surgery) is high risk surgery with risks such as losing your ability to speak, walk or think or blindness. I really can’t imagine what he went through, but the second I woke up from surgery his eyes teared up because he could see in my eyes “ I was back”. Most people did not know how bad I was before surgery. Even my neurosurgeon was amazed that I could walk and talk with the size of the brain cyst I had and that it essentially shut down my pituitary gland and caused immense pressure on my whole brain. I do feel it was a miracle I lived and that my optometrist had a gut feeling something was wrong which led to my MRI. I can never explain to people what it felt like to really lose yourself. It was like I was in a state of dementia and everyone else seemed like the crazy ones. Through my recovery,, I realized a lot of my memories are not correct or even missing.
When I awoke from surgery the world literally felt different. I was in such a state of shock that I didn’t sleep (not at all) for six days and ended up in the ER. I just kept telling people it felt like I was in another dimension. The world was different from what I remembered. I literally didn’t recognize myself in the mirror because I let myself go so badly and the worst of all of it was that Aven looked older than I remembered. I also tried to play the memory card game and couldn’t play with 6 cards. The reality of that was really hard. It’s taken me a while to process this and not sure I ever fully will.
But I remember the second I woke from surgery feeling this fire in me that was gone for many years. To physically feel motivation again was a wild experience. It flooded me and I literally could not wait to get out of that hospital bed and I wrote lists of all the things I wanted to do. That was the hard part. It would be many months that I was trapped in my body. My brain was alive again but my body needed time to catch up. Recovery was torture in its purest form to say the least. For months I thought I was going to die. In brain surgery recovery everyone’s side effects and recovery are different so every time I had a weird symptom, no one could tell me if it was normal or not. I struggled with sleep similar to medieval torture and still do to some degree but its much better. I would get so overstimulated with sights and sounds that I spent months imprisoned in my house.
But very very slowly one small step at a time I got better. Every day I walked a little further and this is when I became a warrior. I started to fight like I was going to war. I pushed myself probably more than doctors would have liked but I grew stronger both physically and mentally, I started swimming and then started doing yoga. I will say yoga and meditation are the real deal and have helped me heal physically and mentally from this trauma. I started therapy and did absolutely everything I possibly could to get better. I started to connect with my former self which was a very bizarre experience. I knew that if I could pull myself out of this anything would be possible in my life.
Now, a year later, I am at my best. Yes, I still have some tough days - PTSD is a real thing and thoughts of it coming back scare the sh*t out of me, but I now focus on honoring the journey I went through and find great strength in it. No matter what challenge comes my way I know I am a WARRIOR and I will never stop fighting and this brings me great comfort. This new world I live in is richer and more full of color. I am proud of myself and the things I have accomplished. I know that this is just the beginning of a new chapter and that as I form new beautiful memories the old scary ones will lose their power.
