Brain damage

I just wish I would have had the presence of mind to deal with it better. To make decisions that came from having a sense of knowing who I was, what I wanted for my family, to be right or to be wrong, but to act with surity.

But I didn't. I guess I learned from that, and that's the point, but it doesn't change the point of reflection. I'm not really sure that any level of higher maturity would have changed the way things happened, but it would have at least made me feel less out of control about my own life scripted in Kyle's sickness.

The head trauma, dare I nudge that word again, may have had a role in the whole thing of it, looking back. It's true I'll never know, but it begs a curious question because I never, ever remember being that scatterbrained, that 'all over', that OUT of ideas in how to handle something before the accident. It's true when I had been pregnant and trying to carve something out of nothing, I had no life experience from which to draw and felt very much the same way; but in the end, I was able to find a job that paid the bills a little better (at least FULL rent and some groceries), make choices with a sense of creativity and with a sense of wanting something better for my baby and me.

The thing is, I'm starting to realize is that before and after the accident I made all these choices out of emotion. When I banged my head up so bad, the only place I knew how to process from and was most comfortable with was emotion. How I got some of it right dealing primarily out of emoting, I'll never know, and it's still in progress, but I'm grateful to the higher powers that be that I did, that I can see these beautiful children of mine process things with logic, creativity, and emotion. Logic escaped me, but I didn't see it that in that way or how the process of coping was gradually skewed by the emotional rail of thought or course of action.

Anyway, I've learned that the frontal lobe controls much of what or how we process thoughts and emotions and I wouldn't doubt it if the extreme bashing my head took bruised that lobe and therefore inhibited any ability to figure it out at all, never mind that soon after an accident (just over a year between the accident and Kyle's third diagnosis and treatment in-hospital.) Then, instead of exercising the brain, performing memory exercises, mental therapy (like physical therapy for the brain?) and working on gaining back that normal mentality, I just started a pattern of thinking from emotion (it didn't hurt like logic and reasoning did) and got into this habit of self-conditioned emotion-response, perpetuated by the stress of the circumstances and events around us.

I really see that it could be this way. I mean, I'm no expert and I have an appointment to talk with someone more qualified, but doesn't this make sense? The point worth pondering is the hypothesis suggested in brain damage: If I bash my brain inside my skull via rollover, then I will have problems processing thought and making intelligent and/or coherent decisions.