Exception to the rule

Persistent Concussion Symptoms (PCS) is diagnosed when a person continues to have the symptoms of concussion beyond a certain timeframe. The time frame is not exact, different sources pin it anywhere between one and three months after the concussion. These same sources, who profess to be experts in the field, will also tell you that most people (anywhere between 70 and 85%) completely recover from concussion within the accepted time frame. Anyone who is left after that is not typical, an exception to the rule.

I suppose that makes me "not typical." But why should I be surprised? I have never been typical.

When I was born, a valve that is supposed to close in the heart, didn't. Some of my blood was bypassing my lungs completely as it journeyed from one side of my heart to the other, depriving me of precious oxygen. I had to have life-saving surgery when I was eighteen months old.

When I was a child, an ultrasound of my abdomen revealed that one of my kidneys has a double helix, meaning double the filters a normal kidney has.

When I was working as a cashier at the local grocery store when I was a senior in high school, I discovered the reason I always posed a certain way for pictures, with one leg sticking out. As I stood waiting on customers, I started hopping from one foot to the other only to discover that I was going up and down as I did so, proving that one leg is actually longer than the other, and had always been that way.

When I was 19, I developed a horrible pain in my right hip one afternoon and by the next morning I was in the emergency department in agony with acute appendicitis. That night I had emergency surgery and the surgeon said that it wouldn't have been long before the organ burst. As it turns out, most people have several episodes of appendicitis before ending up in surgery.

When I was 30, I had a sudden horse-kick sensation in my right side, where the kidney is. It turned out to be a kidney stone. The stone passed out of the kidney into the ureter but got stuck just above the bladder. The stone itself was not that big. But my body swelled around the stone, making it impossible to go any further. I was unable to wait for the scheduled surgery because of the pain and nausea and ended up having emergency surgery. The surgeon told me it took three times as long as usual to break up the stone.

I am not typical.

So when I hit my head in 2019 and didn't immediately recover, though it was a devastation and huge loss, it was not really all that surprising.

The brain is a mass of tissue and nerves. Like any other part of the body, it can be injured. Like any other part of the body, it can be altered. Like any other part of the body, it is possible for it not to heal back to the same functional body part as before.

I can accept that my brain has changed. I can accept that my vision is not the same as it used to be, that I don't process sounds the same way, that my memory needs help. I can't accept that the so-called professionals responsible for deciding what is acceptable, cannot. 

It is time for brain injury specialists to start recognizing that the brain isn't so different after all. It breaks, it changes, it adapts, but it does not go back. Even those who seem to have recovered fully have changed. A full recovery is not a return to before. It is simply a return to full function. And what about those of us who haven't returned to full function? We are not broken. We are divergent.

I may not be typical, but I am not the exception. I am neurodivergent. What are you?