A brain-damaged man…

Today the Cable Guy came from Shaw to change our Internet and give us a land line again – part of the deal. (Main reason we took it – free LD!) He was a young man I knew from the pool, so we established that early on. He was quick, efficient, busy around the house, looking for the easiest way to bring lines in.

He wasn’t in the house ten minutes before I began to feel the anxiety, the pressure. Just like earlier in this process. It began to feel like a full-fledged anxiety attack. I took my BP. It was way up, close to the red zone. I closed the door and lay down for a time as he worked. In an hour I dropped the BP almost 20 points.

But the anxiety was there. When he was setting up, of course Shaw Help was unavailable on line. Of course…He outlined everything I would have to do to get email hooked up, and the phones started. I had taken a phone out earlier and managed, after a lot of head scratching, to set the date and time. I looked at the instruction book for setting up the features. I could read it, but it was small print, and it just overwhelmed me. I am a brain-damaged man. The awareness began it creep into my consciousness. June had tried to prepare me while I was in hospital to always remember that fact, to protect myself. Today, it wasn’t protection; it was an awareness of vulnerability and danger…

When Robin, the Cable Guy, gave me the written instructions for setting up, I swallowed hard. I sat down t do it, and because I felt totally swamped by the amount of information he had left me, I dot only part of it right. Because of my confusion, we lost our old, simple email addresses, and have new and more complicated ones. All because I couldn’t “see” his instruction #2 on the page.

We – Beatrix and – sorted it out in the evening. But she was on hold for like an hour, and I could do nothing. I am a brain-damaged man. Important information, but it doesn’t protect me at the moment; it threatens me; it undermines my sense of competence. I feel like a “retard, “ to use the language of my youth. I feel diminished, like who would ever trust me to do anything, when I get so easily overwhelmed and thus defeated. I feel as though I have been removed from the company of people I would call my peers, and set aside in a category of cracked eggs, usable, but not much…and you can’t trust them for long.

I feel a step or two closer to the end of my life because I am suddenly not a part of the “people you can count on to do things.” I am a brain-damaged man. And here I am, writing at 4:00 AM, wide-awake, head singing. A bad day, saved a bit by a walk, but a day in which my awareness expanded around just how far I have yet to travel in recovery. Will I ever get there, or will I just be what I am now until the end of my life – a brain damaged man?