On February 9, I slipped on black ice in my driveway. My heels went out from under me, and I fell backwards. The back of my head hit the asphalt.
Hard.
When I tried to get up, the sky spun wildly. Violent vertigo. I crawled on my elbows through the snow into the house and called for my husband.
The resulting concussion has not fully healed. The blow scrambled communication between my brain and my eyes. Physical therapists showed me exercises to restore balance, visual acuity, and orientation in space. It will be many more months before I regain my stamina and muscle tone.
Some people who believe that "Everything happens for a reason" might say God was teaching me a lesson: "Slow down, Sondra. You're moving too fast." I don't agree. When I fell, I was not being schooled. Nor was I was being punished by a wrathful God for rebellion or sin.
Nor did I fall because I'm old. Or careless. People of all ages fell on that dangerous day, including my thirty-eight-year-old daughter. She had just shoveled her driveway and was walking back to the garage for salt. Down she went, bruising her knee. Casualties crowded emergency rooms and spiked the caseloads at physical therapy clinics.
It was just bad luck that I slipped on the ice.
But this extended recovery has been teaching me some things. Unasked-for lessons in patience, dependence, idolatry, gratitude, trust. Usually, I'm the one praying for others. During these past months, I've been humbled to realize just how much I am held in a network of care, undergirded by prayer.
In the days immediately following the concussion, however, all I knew was the spinning, the swaying, the fog, the pain.
I could not read, write, watch TV, or drive. Screen time of all kinds was strictly limited. During meals I had to hold my plate at eye level because looking down made me dizzy. Visits from family or friends were overwhelming. When I walked around the house, or even sat still in a chair, my head swam.
Sometimes my eyes jumped uncontrollably, a condition called nystagmus.
Eight months later, most of these symptoms have eased, allowing me to spend increasing minutes at the computer screen. I can take longer walks in the woods. I've gotten to see my grandchildren multiple times. Although when they take naps, so do I.
And, on Labor Day, for the first time since the accident, I went canoeing on a nearby lake in my solo boat. It was a gorgeous early autumn morning in Michigan with clear blue skies and mirror-still water. As my husband and I paddled to the center of the lake, a black and white osprey circled overhead. Suddenly that magnificent bird tucked its wings against its sides, dove headfirst into the water, and rose again, empty talons dripping.
I couldn't stop grinning.
However, the vertigo that I experienced nearly every day for seven months is not entirely gone. When I'm fatigued, there it is again, my unwelcome companion. Sometimes it presents itself as feeling like I'm being pushed over to the right. Sometimes my head wobbles like one of those bobblehead dolls. Sometimes I sway. Sometimes it is a tight gyration in my brain.
I wish it would go away completely.
People have been telling me their concussion stories. When they do, I relive the shock of my own injury. One moment I was getting ready for a winter vacation with friends. The next moment I was flat on my back, the world spinning.
Their stories frighten me. "My friend had a brain bleed at six months," one told me. "My recovery took more than a year," another said. "You will get better. Or you won't," a third counseled.
Brain bleed? A year? Won't get better?!?
I know they mean well. But still.
And yet, though the stories frighten me, they also tell me I am not alone.
In the novel, The Monk Downstairs, the main character, Rebecca, finds it hard to manage full-time work, parenting, crises with her ex-husband, and care for her mother, who recently suffered a stroke. Rebecca has been late – repeatedly – to pick up her daughter from the Bee-Well Kindergarten Day Care. When Rebecca called to say that pick up would be late again, the reply of the woman who ran the place "was clipped short with a you're-a-bad-mother tone. Mary Martha was amusing herself nicely, she said, as if to underline the child's heroic adjustment to a life of appalling neglect."
One day, however, the woman was "unprecedentedly warm." Rebecca's daughter must have shared the story of her grandmother's stroke, because the woman said that her own father had recently had a stroke, too.
"This was offered almost casually, in the shorthand of the afflicted, and Rebecca suddenly glimpsed how vast it was, this secret society of domestic suffering into which she had been initiated. The revelation was a little disorienting. It made the world seems like a different place." *
I experienced a similar revelation on the first Sunday of July when I greeted a young woman at the end of our pew at church. I'd only been back to worship for three weeks. Like many concussion sufferers, I was having a hard time with the loud music, the bright lights, the crowded aisles, and the multiple conversations.
"I'm recovering from a concussion," I blurted out to her, trying to explain why I looked away from her face after a few minutes of conversation.
"I understand," she said. "I have a seizure disorder."
She told me she had her first seizure in 2021 while taking a final exam. "I don't remember the seizure," she said. "I woke up with people standing around me. I got the exam postponed for everyone, though." She smiled crookedly. "I took one for the team." After many tests, she was diagnosed with PNES, Psychotropic Non-Epileptic Seizure Disorder.
Her last seizure was in January, she told me. She had to wait six months before she could drive again. "I got my driver's license back four days ago," she said. Another smile. Having trained to be a social worker, she is currently unemployed because of the January seizure.
I told her about my slow recovery.
"Learning to rest was a challenge," she said.
"Yes," I said."You understand."
I almost cried. It was such a relief to have someone who understood. I believe she was sent to me by God.
Learning to rest. That's what I hope to write about next as my recovery allows – what having this concussion is teaching me about rest. How this period of time calls to mind the strictures and blessings of the biblical command to observe Sabbath. How when we rest, we allow our minds, bodies and hearts to be healed of what ails us, whether caused by illness, injury, or damage done us by the world.
For you, it may be a different affliction that brought you some helpful, if unwelcome, lessons. I'd like to hear about your journey.
Because, thank God, we are not alone.
Scripture: Isaiah 43:5.
Playlist: "How Firm a Foundation," anonymous hymn collected by John Rippon in his 1787 A Selection of Hymns, especially this line "Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed, for I am thy God and will still give thee aid."
* The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington, Harper SanFranisco, 2002, pages 109 and 251.