Hi Donna

Jeez Louise, this sounds really familiar....
I posted a few months ago about all the childhood injuries I had, starting at 11 months when I went out of my crib and was out for 1-2 hours. There were other car accident things (no seat belts in the '50s) and a bad bike accident. Then when I was fifteen I was hit by a car while walking and had a massive concussion and subdural bleeding. After two weeks when they wouldn't let me out of bed, they suddenly let me go home and it was "just get on with it." Of course, it wasn't a nurturing environment. I related to your story of injury #2 (not reporting the head whack because of not wanting to get dad in trouble). When I was 10 and they were exploring the rheumatoid arthritis that had emerged, they X-rayed my right elbow and found that, probably when I was 5 or 6, the elbow had been fractured and the radial head snapped off. Whole incident went untreated.
I'm now 57 and have had problems with arthritis, Sjogren's syndrome (another autoimmune thing), depression, central apnea (brain "forgets" to signal you to breathe), difficulty concentrating, and am now dealing with widespread endocrine strangeness. The biggest problem is fatigue and brain fog--for the last four years I have relied on ritalin if I need to get anything done. The problem is that I just found out that ritalin may be driving one of my hormones to dangerous levels.

I'm glad that you found physicians who took your injuries seriously. I asked a neurologist in the 80's about my string of concussions and he basically blew it off. So I didn't think about it much when I started studying martial arts and continued for 7 years. During that, I learned a lot spiritually, but my brain symptoms got much worse--even though I never concussed.

There's a lot of help for people who are recovering from recent injuries, but I haven't noticed a lot of folks sharing about paying the dues in their '50s for childhood injuries. So I'm really glad you shared all of this. I don't know much about the medical symptoms you mention--I would suggest explaining the acronyms, etc. When I first started posting here, someone requested that I state things more simply and put more white space between paragraphs because some of the readers have visual issues with dense text. I'm a clinician myself, as well as other things, but I try to do that.

I remember when I finally started to share all this all this history came tumbling out in a rush. It's like someone out there is finally listening. That's important if you've come from a background in which folks weren't always listening or observing very well...

Well, it's 0330, which is my usual (sleep disordered) bedtime. BTW, I was able to work and was recently laid off from a position as a hospice chaplain, but I was noticing a real problem with maintaining energy on the job. People 70 years old were getting a lot more done than I was. The brain stuff is at least an explanation of where the energy drained out.

keep writing

Gershon