Saw Dr H and had a mini-holiday yesterday. Today I must once again face the legal mess in which I am embroiled. Within minutes, I find myself drowning in problems and desperately huffing 5-2-5 in the attempt to bring everything back under control.

I suspect I am encountering exactly the same problem I met in the early winter of 2013.

After completing and filing the first insurance appeal, I experienced a contrast between the extreme exertion required to produce that document and my “normal” post injury state. The contrast between the two states made evident the apathetic quality, or the lack of arousal, associated with the “normal” post injury state.

Having an awareness of this contrast made the nature of my injury perceptible to me. I did not wish to sink back into apathy. I wanted to reinforce, or reacquire, or re-engage, in the active state associated with production of the appeal document. Despite the extreme difficulty of this document production effort, the activity involved appeared to more closely resemble a “normal” pre-injury state. I was actively engaged in the performance of a task as opposed to accepting sitting like a bump on a log with a vacant mind staring out into space. This “staring out into space” experience now appeared wrong, or inaccurate, something to be avoided.

I began to cast about for an activity I might undertake that would promote a return to a mental state more closely aligned with what I believed was healthy, correct, or appropriate. At this time I was involved with a small non-profit organization with over 700 members in the Ottawa area. I had the idea of creating a newsletter which might be distributed to the membership on a regular basis and serve to knit the group together and keep everyone better informed. This project was well within my technical competence as it existed pre-injury (I had developed a Human resources Information System (HRIS) while working for Bow Valley Offshore. After the crash in the oil industry I embarked on commercial software development, adapting the HRIS code to the needs of other organizations and also coding a major software project intended to ease the introduction and application of FMEA in the reduction of accident and injury rates in complex engineered environments of the type found in the offshore oil industry). Creating a simple monthly newsletter was an easy to accomplish, simple project. Extending the same platform to permit increased communication between the satellite groups which spanned Canada presented minimal additional technical challenge. It was doable. So I did it.

A few months were spent knitting components together to create an effective info architecture. Through adapting available cloud services, it was possible to achieve a zero cost implementation. I then began to communicate the minimal viable product to each of the satellite groups ranged across Canada. What I failed to foresee was my inability to accommodate the flood of user change requests, the variety and extent of user demands, the various intra-organization political feuds, and a variety of other variables, all of which landed on me like a ton of bricks and rendered me cognizant of the degree to which my normal pre-injury capabilities had been compromised.

I entered a period of crisis.

Since then, I have learned that this form of crisis is common with individuals who have suffered brain injury. The injury itself it not immediately perceptible to the injured party. It is not like a fractured arm, or similar injury, which is immediately apparent due to pain, open wounds, and hemorrhage. None of these factors are present in mTBI. Brain injury is hidden and invisible.

It is not until the mTBI victim attempts to engage in functional activity that the injury makes itself evident. Even then, the injury forces a program of routinization which, coupled with reduced sensory awareness, may inhibit acknowledgement of the injured state. The medical community recognizes that persons with mTBI will underestimate the degree of challenge presented by their injury and will overestimate their competence and their ability to address the associated functional impairment. This is exactly what happened to me.

I had an idea for a technological platform which was well within my pre-injury competence. I launched myself into the project. The project blew up in my face. It forced the discovery and acknowledgment of my post-injury impairment, and the decline in my competence.

I experienced a severe psychological reaction in response to this forced awareness. During this period, suicide was a constant thought. It seemed to be the only viable solution. There appeared to be little or no chance of recovery. Even if there was a recovery, the period of recovery would be extremely prolonged and measured in years. I was already in my 60’s, had lived a full life, was unlikely to obtain any form of employment due to both age and injury, and I did not relish the thought of attempting to restart my life at age 60. I did not relish the thought of the amount of effort involved and the total lack of support from my insurer, the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec, and from the medical community in the province of Québec. Better to end it.