On amnesia recovery

So as we all know, on August 8th 2023 I suffered a traumatic brain injury, which has had many lingering and lasting effects that aren't necessarily going to be lifelong but sure haven't gone away just yet. One of those effects, which I didn't even quite become aware of right away, was that I seemingly lost my ability to remember the month of July 2023. specifically from July 8th to August 8th or so. I remembered getting a massage for my birthday after dealing with the Moms for Liberty stuff, and then I remembered getting the concussion, with nothing in between.

Today, I met someone for the second time who I knew I had met before, but I could not remember when. Rather, I could remember a lot of the incident of meeting them, but not when that memory took place. The other person remembered, and it had apparently happened mere days before my concussion. But this was interesting. The memory was there, but the pathways were messed up. I had the memory, what I lost was the pathway to remembering it by way of thinking about a period of time. The metadata that placed the memory in a specific moment was corrupted, but the memory was still there.

So I went through my calendar backwards to see if it would tell me more about these memories, to help me through that path, and place them in July of 2023. There were.a few things I remained uncertain of or that I still didn't remember, but for most of them I immediately remembered what the calendar event referred to, but was surprised to learn that the event had taken place in July of 2023. I had been remembering all of these memories plenty, I just didn't know when they were. I thought they were all much earlier and more spread out from each other. Things had apparently happened in July 2023 that I remembered as having happened in May, June, April, or even last Winter or the summer prior. Some of the remembering was aided by people I was talking to who were there reminding me what calendar events referred to.

So later in the day, I went through my camera roll. I started on the day of the concussion and scrolled backwards until I hit linear memory again. While a few photos were still perplexing, for the vast majority they all immediately jogged memories that I had, restored those memories, and placed them back into a period of time.

By using these technological memory aids, I had more or less completely fixed my amnesia. Doctors had been waiting for the memories to come back on their own in time and were checking in at every appointment. But all it took was looking at records to re-form those memory pathways. And I know that I definitely was doing a lot of cognitive work to restore those memories back to where they belonged and reshape those pathways. I got terrible headaches after the calendar review and after the photo roll. It was a tremendous mental effort but it worked.

It reminded me of right after the concussion when I was asked who the president was. I had immediately answered "Barack O-" stopped myself, said "wait," and then realized I didn't know who the president was. The pathway to "who is the president" was blocked. I knew it couldn't still be Obama because of term limits, but who else could it be? I had to think back to the 2012 election an remember that Obama was re-elected, and then go 2012+4 is 2016 and try to remember the 2016 election. Remembered that Donald Trump had been elected president and had a whole weird emotional moment reprocessing that that had happened. Then realized that 2016+4 = 2020 so there must have been another election, tried to remember that, remembered watching fireworks on an unseasonably warm November night as it had been declared that Trump had lost the election... but who had won? It was Joe Biden. Had emotions remembered that that had happened. And then finally answered "Joe Biden..... I think" and the doctor said "Good. You got there eventually. The memory is still there."

I hadn't forgotten who the president was. I had only lost the pathway to finding that information and had to take a detour to get there. All of my July 2023 memories were the same. I was able to remember them through other pathways, but not through directly trying to remember them by thinking backwards from August 8th or forwards from July 8th. I had to remember them through photos, calendar entries, topics related to the events. The memories had become nonlinear. When I remember when they happened now, the pathway cuts through those photos and calendars. They all cut through today as the memory that tells me that information. when I remember what he president is, I pass through that doctor's office sitting there reforming the path.

My brain injury makes me feel like I'm driving my thoughts, memories, and information retrieval on manual sometimes even more so than the autism already did. As though I can truly feel the exact linear neural pathways of neurons linked to author neurons and need to follow them down the right roads to get where I'm going.

There are still so many other paths covered in debris in need of repairs. All sorts of hobbies that remain impaired and skills I still can't really do anymore. Reading books still gives me migraines. Certain kinds of thinking are a struggle. Without all these paths, I feel like a different and more shallow person. I'm not quite the same as before.

But today I managed to brute force recover a month of my life, even though it hurt in more ways than one. That's pretty rad I think.

anyway, no falling, be careful, dont' trip, and don't hit your head