2017 - Part 1

Boys will be boys, right? As a group of us waited for our theater teacher to arrive - who always happened to be minutes late - we started goofing off. Just typical teenage boy stuff, and I fussed and screamed like a typical teenage girl, playing into their roughhousing. A little too far, that’s all it took. As I sat on the edge of our beautifully rustic stage, my legs were yanked from underneath me. My head smacked back on the stage with force, my body still moving. Then I fell another four feet, where my head broke my fall on the hard wooden floors.

I blacked out.

And then, I woke up to all of my classmates standing over me with wide eyes. It took a minute to adjust, to remember what had just happened and how I ended up on the ground. I was embarrassed as variations of “are you okay?” and “oh my gosh” flooded the room. Without a teacher there I got myself up and walked through the theater doors in the direction of the nurse's office.

I felt fine for a person who had smacked their head pretty hard, twice. The nurse held up a few fingers, to which I correctly identified, and dismissed me. I went about my day and fell asleep in my twin dorm bed like any other night.

Do you know when something feels off, but you can’t quite describe it? That’s exactly how I felt waking up the next morning, yet I still didn’t have a headache or any obvious problems. That was until I accidentally slammed myself into a wall and felt nothing. And then almost fell off the toilet. Something was definitely wrong.

I yelled to my roommate that I was going to see the AOD, Administrator On Duty at our school. Now to set the scene, our desert campus is everything but flat, filled with rocks, dirt, spiky cactuses, and long treks from building to building. As I left my dorm I ran into our Dean of Academics, who also happened to be my advisor. We walked to the Dining Hall, where the AOD would be stationed. I lifted my leg to get up a step into the building, only to fall flat on my face. This is the moment panic set in. I called my mom, who immediately started freaking out - not a good sign. She called a doctor friend who expressed that I needed to get to the hospital ASAP.

My mom asked for the school to call an ambulance.

“No, that’s okay I will drive you” says the nurse. I went straight for her car, not returning to my room for any items.

The doctor took a few looks at me, ran a few tests and called it good.

“Maybe you just slept wrong?”

In my experience, the doctor was most likely assuming, like many people, that I was just a dramatic teenager. I’m not saying this wasn’t true, but I was also very in tune with my body and this wasn’t just an “oh, maybe I need a different pillow” situation.

It’s a blessing, and a curse, that my mother is a very adamant human being. And her momma senses were probably tingling. As a survivor of a Traumatic Brain Injury, she asked if they would run a CT scan.

This is where things got interesting.

Part 2...