Originally Posted by 79pmooney

Good news! My first memories were something I heard in ICU (from a lifelong friend who was studying me for his Phd! No visual at all to go with it. I remember nothing else from that week, thankfully especially the room which was a glass walled empty, bare box with a back wall of floor to ceiling electronics. My next memory was in the ward and included visuals. My memories of people were 3 after hearing those words in ICU; my housemate who I barely knew, my riding partner (whose house I was riding to when I crashed) and my charge nurse. They did not include any family. (My mom was practically living at the hospital.)

Machka, don't take offense if Rowan's early recognitions and memories don't include you. There is a huge random factor after brain injuries. The analogy I use for mine is that I was running an ancient DOS computer (my brain) when my accident occurred. The accident was someone pulling the plug. At the time I was running a program I loaded from a friend's floppy disk. He had to leave, so I gave him his disc back and was still running the program in RAM. Plug pulled, that program was gone, all except a few things I happened to save to the hard drive. (For me, that morning, everything was gone but a note my housemate left for me regarding the club we went to the night before to hear music. I remember the note but nothing of the night before.) When the computer got plugged back in, there was some hardware issues that had to be fixed (I came out of the coma but not all my brain's wiring was repaired until one weekend 4 months later I visited a childhood friend. More on this later. I got home and the next morning it was obvious all the wiring was back.)

Now the other huge thing that happened is while the computer was unplugged, the DIR (directory) command disappeared. Now I had a hard drive (brain) full of a lifetime of facts, all stored in directories but no road map to either find or recall all these lost files or even the directory tree. Now, bumbling around on the keyboard, I would occasionally open a directory by accident and stumble on a file. This would start hours or days of recalling that part of my life. (Great to get the memories back, but the process was VERY draining.)

40 years later, I am still stumbling on directories. It doesn't happen often and now a lot of those directories no longer have much significance but the early years it happened a lot, often in such concentrate4de numbers that having an escape that was completely familiar was an incredible Godsend. For me, it was the bike. My first escape was at the end of my first outpatient PT. After the session I asked if I could ride the exercise bike. It was awful! So not my racing bike! And I was so weak I had to turn the resistance down to zero. But after about 5 minutes, I was spinning the pedals at race speed and forgetting about all the new stuff being thrown at me every minute of the 16 hours I was awake each day. The bicycle never stopped being that escape.

Machka, all head injuries are very different. Rowan's won't look remotely like mine. I just spelled out some of my journey so you will be a little more prepared for the crazy non-sequiturs you are going to witness. Hang in there. I'll be praying for both of you.

Ben