I have just compared my current writing effort with my first attempt to document my injury. On June 11th 2012, I went to a Gatineau clinic as directed by staff at the Hôpital de Hull. The clinic receptionist informed me that there would be only a years wait before I saw a physician.

I could not believe this. I had been trying to find work. When I went to a job interview, I made multiple errors. Normally I did well in interviews. I had once sat on the recruiter’s side of the desk and I understood the interview process quite well. Now I was making silly, stupid errors. Even worse, I was making the same errors over and over again, despite trying hard to avoid them. And here I was, being told I had to wait a year before I even commenced to have the problem addressed.

My experience with Dr. L, and with others, was that I was not doing an effective job of communicating my issues. I was forgetful. I would tend to agree with everything and “go with the flow,” as this was the easiest course of action. But it also resulted in poor communication of my experience. I therefore resolved to write everything down. I wanted a written record that I might present to the next physician.

Once I completed recording my problems, once I had collected all of the strange goings-on in a single document, I became even more convinced that I was facing some sort of serious issue. The fact that it would be a year before I saw a physician made me despondent. I decided to contact Dr D, a clinical psychologist I had worked with before the accident. My email to her was titled “A Call For Help.” I owe her a huge debt for responding and for her generous assistance since that email. If you read this — Thank You!

The Call For Help that went to Dr D was 2,841 words long and was composed over a 15 day period. It was an extremely hard document to write. I averaged 189 words per day and achieved this slow rate of production despite devoting all of my time to document creation. Writing was a slow and arduous process.

The notice from the Collège des médecins du Québec was dated September 20th 2013. I have 30 days to respond. This text is being written on October 12th. I have been working continuously on a rebuttal submission for over 12 days now and have written 2,484 words. Divided by 12 days of work this equals a daily production of 207 words per day. This is hardly a change from the rate of production I achieved 15 months ago.

There have been some minor improvements. I am now better adjusted to the tempo. I know what to expect, have a better sense of my deficits and limitations. I understand the process and the nature of the daily struggle. I have been down this road before. I have learned the ropes. This is what I know:

• That I will shift into a disrupted sleep wake cycle that spans the 24 hour day. This work cycle will be composed of “shifts” of 4 to 5 hours duration punctuated by naps of 1 to 1.5 hours interleaved with longer sleep periods of 4 to 5 hours.

• That I will want to run, escape, abandon, forget, leave the project, just walk away from it, and never deal with any of this ever again.

• That I must exert self discipline and force myself to continue. The alternative is to accept the neglect being imposed by others.

• That I will encounter despair at my slowed abilities, and a range of problems associated with working with documents. Pieces of paper are a huge obstacle. There is a frustration that lurks just beneath the surface whenever I need to handle multiple physical documents; I lose things I held in my hand not a minute before. I end up wanting to to throw everything across the room.

• That I am wise enough to take break periods. These will include departing the house for a 2 hour walk, or spending an equivalent amount of time cooking a meal.

• That working on blog images is a very soothing activity.

• That working on free-form text, or self-directed reflective text such as this blog post is also relaxing. I believe this is due to the fact that I do not need to worry about communicating with a 3rd party. I am, in essence, writing formal notes to myself. Plus, this is entirely virtual. There are no sheets of paper to lose.

• That I must avoid thinking about time pressures and deadlines or I will be overwhelmed. I need to focus on just blindly plugging away at the work.

• That I will forget to eat meals and will need to pay close attention to my diet.

• That I will have episodes of feeling that this effort is to no purpose, that I am dealing with a social machine, an inhumane mechanism with no care or concern for me or my welfare. The mechanism has only one purpose and that is to reject my claim regardless of the validity of that claim.

• That if I am not careful a growing sense of futility will trigger thoughts of suicide as a means of terminating all of these problems. Camus asserted that suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem. Suicide is one of the hall marks of our species, for we are the only species that has consciousness, that maintains an awareness of what it means to be alive. We are also the only species with an understanding of our pending death, the penultimate moment when all that we experience will be surrendered. That to be human is to be constantly confronted by the question of life, a life informed by rational judgment to determine if our life experience continues to have value. All of us face the knowledge of our pending death. Each of us must confront the reality of our situation and decide between waiting passively for the inevitable, or taking action in the present moment. And that too is a core human trait — the need to galvanize ourselves into action, the very fact that we enact our lives and create a continuous autonomous being each moment of our days.

• That I am now sixty one and, if I attain the life span of my father, I will experience 72 years on this earth. Eleven more years. 4,015 days. If I don’t jump first.

And if I actually win through this, that is to say, if I actually come out the other side of this TBI experience sufficiently intact to live out the rest of my anticipated 4,015 days, then I want to devote that time to ensuring that no human being is forced to go through anything similar to what I have had to endure.

 Update

In university a regular essay assignment was between 1,500 and 3,000 words and rarely longer than that. An essay of this length could be completed in a couple of days with perhaps two or three actual work hours per day. The most difficult part of the assignment was the collection of references and the tedious task of typing out the bibliography — all those evil superscripts and nasty italics and each citation had to conform to an approved style.

The current writing effort is not confined to a couple of hours a day. It takes up the entire day and it continues well into the night, It becomes a round the clock effort with no let up and totally takes over my life. But I need to push like this to get a relatively simple 2,000 word piece of exposition out the door. No search for references. No citations. No bibliography. No typing. No ribbon changes. No carbons. 15 days non-stop.