Thank you all for the responses.

I'm sorry for the delay in responding, but I forgot I had posted this thread.

The spinal tap did the trick and relieved me of most of the debilitating and severe physical symptoms.

Still the biggest challenge I've had since that point is recovering from the five months of bed rest I had to live through while I was in that horrible and severe pain.

More recently I've been diagnosed with a fatigue disorder that I guess accompanies mTBI which certainly doesn't help me to exercise in order to build up more strength and stamina from losing it while on bed rest, but I'm doing much better than I was.

Immediately after spinal tap, I had a lot of pinched nerve pain radiating down my arms from my cervical spine. They gave me MRI's and said I had bulging disks most likely caused by the whiplash from the accident I was in. I dealt with that pain for a few months, which was bad, but not nearly as bad as the pain was from the iicp and thanks to physical therapy it's now all gone and just comes back as discomfort or numbness every once in a while. I've done a lot of reading online about the variety of things I went through and I'm not quite sure if the pain from the iicp was so bad that I barley felt the pain in my neck and body or if it literally stopped allowing many of the pain messages from going to my brain by constricting the nerves.

My neurologist was concerned it might come back so she still sees me every couple of months to see how I'm doing. She also keeps prescribing me with meds to help with the fatigue, but so far their various side effects have been too significant for me to want to take any of them for more than a trial period.

I'm actually going to return to work part time on August 1 and I'm very excited and happy about it.

My processing speed and cognitive functioning is still not as fast or as good as it was before the accident, but I'm hoping with time I will make more improvements and that returning to work might even help with my rehabilitation process.

My speech has even been slowly improving; the accent is now mostly or all gone, but I speak in a deeper tone at a clipped and unpredictable rhythm that is sometimes accompanied with a rasp. I'm going to speech therapy to learn how I can make it sound closer to what it was like before the accident.

And yeah, Melody, I've read about that syndrome, it's pretty rare and I'm just glad I'm sounding more like myself these days so a diagnosis of that isn't necessary for me. Thanks for the welcome!