High School

 

Concussed.

I went from a normal functioning student to a girl who could barely get out of girl in less than an hour because I hit my head on podium by not paying attention to where I was walking for a split second. I slept for 18 hours a day for the first few weeks, taking breaks only to eat and drink a little, go to the bathroom, or drive to the doctor with a blanket over my head, head stabilized between my knees, and NASCAR earplugs in my ears. After this period, I started stepping outside of my zone to try and condition myself back to normal. This came with a plethora of challenges – I couldn’t get up without feeling like I was falling into a pit of nothingness; I couldn’t walk without clutching the wall, the rail, or something to keep my balance; I couldn’t go down stairs, walk by edges, or walk along bridges without imagining gory scenes of me falling and splitting my head into a thousand pieces; I couldn’t talk at my usual volume because that would exacerbate the constant pounding I felt going from my temples to the base of my neck. The pounding rarely stopped – it became this pest that wouldn’t cease to nag me for all the things that I thought were dead and gone. Things that I hadn’t thought about for months began to haunt me in my solidarity. I thought of my grandmother’s death, and her loss truly sunk in for the first time. I thought of my plans for the future, heck, I even thought of the craziest OO ideas I could think of just because I had the free time to do so. But, once I started getting more active, I started showing more symptoms. I started throwing up every time I tried to help out in the kitchen, falling backwards when I tried to blow-dry or wash my hair, and getting massive headaches from having a 30-minute phone conversation with my cousin. Darkness and silence were my companions, because I suffered in brightness and noise. I felt like a hermit, wearing sunglasses everywhere I went and facing the barrier between the world and me. When we had to go to a family wedding, I felt beautiful in all my Indian outfits, but I had to wear sunglasses, a neck brace, and earplugs to every event so I could last as long as possible and so I didn’t feel like a burden on my family. But despite all these props, I still had to leave nearly every event early. It was disconcerting that I couldn’t even celebrate the happy occasion and hit the dance floor with the rest of my family, but I was able to hang out during the afternoons and nights with my younger nieces and nephews who also turned in early. Though I wasn’t able to enjoy the wedding as I usually do, I was able to enjoy it in a different and more intimate way. From this experience I learned the importance of alone time – be it “me time” or “one-on-one time,” we should all allocate a little bit of it every day.