It is hard to believe, but this is the 200th blog post. I resurrected the dormant blog in May of 2013 on the recommendation of Dr H. It is strange to read the early posts.

The May 26th 2013 post on wound images fails to mention salicylate which appears to have been the trigger for this blistering. I still have a problem site on my left elbow but the left forearm now shows only an extended oblong area of white scar tissue. I have slowly reintroduced caffeine to my system and can now drink a cup without any evidence of blistering. When I began the blog, a single cup of coffee would result in a huge skein of blisters both on my forearm and elsewhere.

I remain slow and forgetful. I think I have learned to concentrate harder, to develop and maintain a strong task focus. This does not prevent me from making errors; I need to double check everything and this further slows me. I compensate for being slow by spending an increased amount of time in order to complete a project. I started writing early this morning and made two blog posts out of existing notes, working continually without break, or interruption, until a little after 3:00 PM. At that time, I decided I needed to eat something.

I still lack anxiety. I recently found some research which sheds light on this lack of anxiety. That is the topic of a future post.

The June 6th, 2013 After Midnight post describes my experience of identifying with the recovery story provided by another TBI victim. That was a powerful moment. I am glad I was recently able to provide something similar to another person with brain injury.

It is interesting to me that in June of 2013 I was attempting to address some of the same ground I covered more thoroughly in the TBI Proposal. I remember writing each of these three posts:
Collective Works as a Business Strategy
Business Calculations
Re Cycling
I was trying to get at “something” and had the conscious sense that I was missing my target in some way. So I went back again, and again, and ended up adding a short summary of the points I was attempting to address. These same ideas resurfaced almost a year later when I devoted a large block of time to writing out the TBI Proposal. Most of the concepts associated with the Daffodil Network first germinated in these early posts but did not fully flower until years later. It was as if I was attempting to pull something from mind but was not truly able to do so at first.

The story of the Daffodil Network is an interesting one. I am sure the question will be asked of how the name came to be. The daffodil has a long history of use in traditional healing and produces a compound used in the treatment of dementia. It’s alternate name refers to the myth of Narcissus, the story of a young man engaged in self reflection. Narcissus went to an extreme but I suspect every victim of brain injury is forced to engage in self reflection and may have great difficulty in accepting what they discover. The daffodil has associations with regeneration and the optimism that arrives after a long period of grey despair. That seems highly appropriate to brain injury. The clincher was the fact that it was one of the few single word domains still available. This saved having to come up with a viable neologism such as Xyme or Toodle (both of which turn out to be already registered).