A chance to talk about myself and others will listen?!? . . . . Sweet!!
My avi is me after my motorcycle wreck in 2005 <---- Not really sure if that is a shoe in just because of what happened shrug
A car turned Right in front of me (I was coming to a T in the road and turning R myself, she was turning in a driveway just before the T), I was ejected over the front of the car and my R arm got stuck in the windshield. As I am flying over the hood, my nerve was pulled out of my C 3-4, similar to how you pull a plug out of a wall socket. The injury is called a brachial plexus avulsion. With only a pair of Carhartt work pants and no leather pants on, I have massive road rash and subsequent skin grafts on my R knee. I broke my femur and that all was nothing compared to my severeTraumatic Brain Injury. I was in a coma for nearly six weeks. Three of those I was in a total vegetative state. The doctors told my family I if I didn’t die in my sleep, I would be a burden on them for the remainder of my life.
Happy to have proved the doctors in the known to be completely wrong. I was 25 when I was hurt and because of that age and the level of the TBI, the majority of people thought they knew how I would grow up. Fast forward eight years and on a road trip through California, I came down with mono. With my head injury in '05, it was another TBI for me! Except this was different than typical head injuries. Mono places a huge damper on your immune system and with my brain lacking oxygen for a short period of time, I experienced an anoxic brain injury. Instead of loosing more of my short term memory (which still lacks) I remembered even more of my past!
When I was ~8 I fell out of a huge tree in our back yard. I fell maybe twenty feet but caught branches as I fell. I blacked out for just a moment.
About a year later I was playing in the sandbox we had in the backyard, it was surrounded with railroad ties. After school one day I had the bright idea of going down the slide head first. It was maybe three-thirty in the afternoon of that late September day. When I woke up, my mouth was full of dry sand and when I walked in the house, dinner was just starting. Afraid of my gestapo mother, I said nothing because of my fears. Yet I now now these injuries are the reason for my “quirks” yet they also allowed me to survive in '05.
One last portion about my brachial plexus avulsion, five weeks after my wreck Dr. Angela Wong out of Salt Lake tried to graft nerves from my R leg into my R humerus. Before the surgery my pain was never terrible, sure it sucked but I was able to easily live with it. Pain is the first perception to come back and after the surgery I had massive amounts of pain. Well the pain only got worse and my arm has never worked since that day.
I have a spinal cord simulator in place but if causes my leg to fall asleep when I turn it on. So most often it is off anyway.
The worst portion in my opinion: adult and embryonic stem cell therapies have been around since about the early to mid nineties. Since that time the second Bush federally funded adult stem cell therapy and turned off the embryonic stem cell side of funding the research. Barry took office and switched the two camps. Not even touching the obvious moral implications, adult stem cell therapies have cured an untold number of people. Embryonic therapies have not saved a single person, in the history of the world! Adult stem cell therapy would help me to gain function in my arm again. However my injury is not terminal so I do not qualify for trails.
I met a lady many years ago who had the same type of injury as I had and she had three kids. She said hands down the avulsion pain was for more severe, but I also know a lady who worked out hard and after she became pregnant, her labor and delivery was short and she claimed the experience was uncomfortable but manageable.
Edited slightly for clarification.