May 18 2003 I was driving the 60 miles home from work. I am an RN and was then working in tylemytry and CICU(where the pts go after they have interventions like stents or balloon plasty during a heart cath) long 12 hour shifts. The sun in my eyes and really really sleepy, I had pulled over a couple of times to sleep for 30 minutes at a time, but it was not enough. I dozed off and the Toyota RAV 4, an SUV, with front wheel drive, an evil combination high center of gravity and front wheel drive. I realized immediately I had dozed off and turned the wheel to the left to get back on the road, then back to the right for fear there might have been another car in that lane, there had been but they were still a bit behind me. I started rolling over and yelling "nooooooooooo" and then slammed into a tree and fence on my wheels. I had a scuba tank in the back of my car, I had donated it to the fund raiser garage sale the Order of Eastern Star had but it had not sold so by luck it was in the car rather than the storage building where it belonged. Either that or the car jack smacked me in the head, probably the jack, Toyota did not see fit to secure the jack in that model, but I tell people the scuba tank, since it makes me feel exotic... like one of James Bond's girlfriends, where telling folks I got smacked with a car jack makes me feel more like Ethal Mertz. They cut me out of the car and took me to the local rual hospital where I recieved less than adequate care. No mannitol, no CT for over 2 hours and then despite the C2 fracture the putz started intubating me, grabbed me by the face... lots and lots of facial fractures and pulled my head back... so I bit him in the thumb, hard. Quit breathing after that, put on a helecopter and taken to the ER at the hospital where I worked. oh boy!! That was what I had been yelling for since I was cut out of the car. I was awake enough and lucid enough until I quit breathing 2 1/2 hours post injury to give my name and health history, but when they took me off the copter I was on a vent, pupils blown, bone and brain sticking out of my head. They did a crainiotomy and took out most of my right skull. Just had skin and hair (when it grew back a bit) over my brain for 6 months. Then lo and behold they shaved me and peeled me and put in an artificial skull, methymathacrylate, sort of like Lexan or really a two part epoxy more like Bondo. Really. Too weird. I was about 2 weeks in an induced coma to decrease intercranial pressure, finally off the vent and on to the neuro unit, puked constantly, double vision, big field cuts no peripheral vision, laughed at everything, no combative stuff just kinda inappropriate most of the time. Most of my friends said to me at the time I was just funnier not all that different. But I felt different, lots of pain, lots of fear and confusion. Neck brace, no place to pin a halo I guess. On to Rehab, cool I was the charge nurse for 7 years there before I went to a critical care unit. So all the people I used to work with have seen me naked and incontinent, cool. Lots of therapy inpatient, then discharged me and I stayed in a hotel like place next door and took out patient rehab for two more weeks, then outa there. Went to California and stayed with my sister for the rest of the summer, did some more PT and Sissy worked my bum off, I came in July with a walker not far and not fast and by the end of July I was walking 4 miles at a time in the woods behind her house in the mountains. They hiked my butt all over the coast at Patricks Point and on the Rim trails. Beautiful. Bitter at the first doc, yep, my neuropsychologist figures if he had given me Mannitol instead of humongous amounts of saline I might have done a lot better might not have had to have that bit of brain clipped out that was so mashed from the swelling it was right over the optic nerve and so I might have had most of my sight intact instead of being 20/400 in the spot I can see in. But listening to some of the stuff that has happened to ya'll I feel pretty lucky, some times I tell people that getting smacked in the head might have been the best thing to ever happen to me. Weird I know, but it has strengthened my faith, made me a woman of courage, allowed me time home with my son, might with disability allow me to return to school eventually to pursue my BS and then my MS. Brought me back together with the man of my life, we had split 4 years before but when he heard about my troubles he educated himself about tbi, therapies and interventions. He is a good and kind man, a brilliant man, a writer of political satire and also politics and economics. He loves this holeinherhead woman just the way I am, punk hair do and all *smile* and he looks like Sean Connery in Medicine Man with a bit less hair on the top. So I am confused but really happy most of the time, I have my bad days, hard days, can't get anything done unless the light is r! eally good, less money, no health insurance yet, but I will be fine. I am not the kind of person that stops, that gives up. It is hard sometimes to even get up, I have a lot of pain, but no headaches, no spinal cord injury, and I have the best family in the world so it don't get much better than this. Loveyameanit, Holes