A Whack on the Head Stirs Compassion

Earlier this year my husband came home from the gym to find me sitting in a chair in our family room, staring blankly into space, the right side of my face red and swollen, the black bruise underneath my chin beginning to streak down my neck.

For about ten minutes he talked to me, and I to him, as he tried to pry an explanation from me. I was not a fount of information, asking more questions than giving answers.

Then, my husband remarked that the front of my clothing was cold and damp, indicating that I may have been lying outside on snow and ice for a while. My hearing his comment marked my return to the land of the living. It was exactly like flipping on a light switch. I went from total mental fog to complete awareness, just that fast.

Our best guess is that I slipped on the ice on our driveway, fell forward, broke my fall with my face and lost consciousness. At some point, I got up, picked up our recycle bins, carried them into the garage, put down the garage door and removed my shoes before entering the house. Based on the placement of items I’d been carrying, I’d wandered around inside the house before plopping into the chair where my husband found me.

I remember nothing, nil, nada of any of this.

After regaining my wits, one of my first thoughts was, “I owe so many of my patients a big apology.”

Early in my nursing career I had worked in ER where daily cases of concussion were pretty much a sure thing. Of course, I knew head trauma caused befuddlement but, obviously, I didn’t know exactly how that played out--that patients could walk around, seeming to function almost normally, but really not be of this world. Just because my patients were talking to me didn’t mean they could comprehend or retain anything I said to them. I know now that I expected too much of them and probably wasn’t as patient as I should have been (with any luck, maybe my patients don't remember that part of their ER experience). If I’d been told that I could function and converse the way I did and not have a single memory of it, I wouldn’t have believed it. As with so many things in life, you live, you learn, you gain compassion.