Thank you for reading my story.

My name is Tina Means. People used to call me Tina Mean’s “business”, not any more. That was a past life. As I write this I have a new found appreciation for myself. This "new found" appreciation of where I have come from and how far I have progressed is a bonus I didn’t expect. My story is sad on many levels but there is more hope, understanding and gratitude that came out of these sad facts than there are sad facts.

I was 36 years old and I thought I was on top of the world. I had it all. I was a type A- personality, meaning I could have fun if it was presented but I would rather work than play. I was single, no children, had my own house, new pick up truck, new car, expensive clothes, jewelry, a boyfriend and lots of money and friends. For work I was on top of the world also. I was the only Finance Manager at a local car dealership. I also had been a cattle broker for years. I had earned my stripes with the good old boys. I was making more money than I ever dreamed I could. Life was good. I was digging life and life was digging me.

That is, until,

I got thumped on the head by encephalitis. I would not know for one year what was the matter with me. The car dealership where I was the finance manager sent me to Chicago for two weeks of extended training. I thought this was great. I was looking forward to going. I was flown to Chicago and stayed in the finest hotel, ate the finest food, mingled with the finest people and had company expense money to burn. I had taken two extra days to goof off and relax before school started on Monday. I was having a great time. I was the only female in a class of 32 men. I was proud of that, being the only female. I felt like it was another feather in my cap. During the coarse of the week,

I had made friends with 6 of the guys. Every night we went to Happy hour, dinner then we would all study together. We all became chums. We had spent all week planning our weekend. It was packed full of good times. We all were going to do Chicago up right. Friday after school we all rented a car and we were off to find a party. We found one, of course. It was 11:00 and I was dancing when it started to hit me. I thought shoot I am getting the flu. Darn. I had the guys take me back to the room at 1:00 am on Saturday morning. I told them to forget about me for the rest of the weekend cause I knew this flu was about to get bad. I told them I would call if I needed anything. That’s the last thing I remember until they found me on Tuesday. On Tuesday one of the guys had a maid open the door because I wouldn’t answer. I kept saying to them “I’m OK, I’m OK,” and would sleep. They left me alone until the next day. Then they came in again and tried to get me to eat. I wasn’t about to eat, I was too sick. They each grabbed an arm and took me to a clinic where the DR. proscribed some antibiotics, antihistamines and some pain pills for my headache. DR. told them I would be fine in a few days. The suggestion was made about taking me to the hospital and I guess I got real mad and kept saying, “I’m ok.” One of the guys changed my plane reservations for the following Monday instead of Friday. They all went home on Friday. I was there all alone in Chicago and sick. I didn’t know or care. Monday came and the hotel people packed me up and turned me over to the cab driver. The cab driver gave me over to the sky caption. I was barely shuffling to walk. The whole world was like I was on a ship on a rough sea. Up and down, up and down. The right side of my face felt huge and hideous. It still feels that way most of the time. The motion of the high seas fortunately, went away after a year or so but I still have balance problems. The skycap handed me over to the flight attendant and she laid me down on a row of seats then handed me off to another flight attendant. I was to transfer in Denver and the skycap brought a cart and handed me off to another flight attendant. I was on my way home, finally. I knew my boyfriend would be there to pick me up. I keep thinking I wanted to see him one more time before I died. It wasn’t a matter to me of “if” I was going to die, just when. When they took me off the plane in Wyoming, I do remember seeing his face and he had a big happy smile that changed in a flash to horror and fear. I remember the color drained from his face. He took me home and put me to bed. He tried to feed me and I guess I did eat a little.

He stayed for 3 day’s. He had to go home to his own home that was 175 miles away to tend to his cattle and horses. He called a girlfriend of mine to come and check on me. All of this is fuzzy, at best. I do not recall him leaving or when my friend showed up. I remember sleeping and waking up day after day thinking, “oh, it’s light outside” then “Oh, it’s dark now.” I can’t tell you how long this went on. My girlfriend was married with two boys. One was 4 and the other was a newborn. She did the best she could for me. She came every morning. She kept me going. After I had been home for two weeks someone at work decided that I should be getting better. I wasn’t getting much better. My boss came by to see me and ask when I would be back to work. He got the picture that it wasn’t going to be any time soon. I had a garden variety of symptoms, more like a list. The fatigue was overwhelming. Picking my head up was a struggle. I didn’t make much sense when I spoke was taking sideways and backwards. I was reading from right to left, so naturally things didn’t make sense and since I would forget before I got to the end of the sentence, it didn’t matter anyway. My balance was all but gone. I was a passenger on a ship that was on the high seas. I would walk off to the left and run into walls, splat, then slide down to the floor. For a long time crawling was safer and quicker. The tinitus was roaring all the time and still does. It’s just my own personal background noise now. If the noise in my head gets too loud I just turn on the radio. Racing irrational thoughts that I thought were real. Startle reflex was on full alert. I was awakened nightly by nightmares and panic attacks that would make me run outside, gasping for air. I would be outside barefoot in the snow. My sense of smell was affected. Everything had this unrecognizable foul smell. CONFUSION. Lots of confusion. It was hard to swallow so hard that I would choke on my own spit.

The next thing I remember is being taken to the Billings clinic by one of the secretaries at the dealership. She and I had become friends so she volunteered. I was taken to an ear, nose and throat Dr. The nurse put me in a sound proof room that was dimly lit, warm, and sat me in a comfortable chair. I went to sleep while she was trying to give me a hearing test. She had to keep waking me up, so when the Dr. came in to give his assessment of me, he told my girlfriend that I was “crazy” and he “should put me in the phyc ward for evaluation.” Then he said, that on the “off chance he was wrong, he was going to send us upstairs to a neurologist.” The neurologists took one look at me, ask me some questions, did a spinal tap and wanted to put me in the hospital. I got mad, said I wasn’t going into the hospital. He finally said fine but I had to stay across the street at the motel, lay flat and not get up for two day’s. That’s what I did. My girlfriend got me set up with drinks by the bed and drove back to Wyoming so she could work the next day. Now I was alone, again. Three day’s later; my boss came to pick me up in Montana and took me home. I still didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was so confused. I couldn’t leave the house. I just slept. Two weeks went by and the neurologist called and said that I did have “something” but it was too late to do anything about it and I would get better but it was going to take a long time. He never said encephalitis. I didn’t ask or care what I had.

My boyfriend would show up once a week and stay for two day’s. That’s all he could take of me. I was a grade A prime bitch. No more sweet Tina like before. I was mad. Self-hatred became a religion for me. My chant, my mantra was “die.” I had mood swings that would go from laughing hysterics to suicidal crying jags in minutes. I self mutilated my arms several times.

I was awful to be around. I hated being around me. I wanted to die. If you got around me on the wrong day at the wrong moment I hated you too and would tell you so. I would make plans to kill myself every week. My favorite suicide plan was to jump in front of a speeding semi truck. Lots of drama that way. I felt so sorry for me. Poor me. Pity parties were a daily event. I threw wonderful pity parties. I would watch the 700 club and pray with Pat Robinson to let me die. I kept totally isolated to the point I would draw the drapes and unplug the phone. There must have been a bigger part of me that wanted to live. The internal fight of good and evil.

I was not put on medication for years. It never occurred to the Dr, or me either. I would try and get out of bed and would fall down, so I crawled everywhere. If I couldn’t make it back to bed I would just sleep where I was. Kitchen, bathroom, where ever. Finally, I managed to go outside one day. I went to the street, turned around and didn’t know which house was mine. Panic set in. I went to the closest house and went in. It was my house. I didn’t go out the front door for a long time. I don’t know how much later but I started to call work and tell them I was coming to work. Then I would call and cancel. I kept doing this for a while. Then after some time, I finally did get showered and dressed and called and they came and got me. I went to sleep on the floor next to my desk. They took me home. I guess I did this several times. My paycheck showed up every two weeks until I called and said I cant do this, I quit. I used up all my savings; sold stocks, maxed out my credit cards, sold antiques I had, sold everything I could. I was so afraid of being homeless. My greatest fear was just about to come true.

No one ever suggested any kind of rehabilitation. So, I was not receiving any kind of rehab therapy. This was small town Wyoming and there just wasn’t the help there. Had I known there was help out there for me I would have moved. I just didn’t know it was available at the time. I started to do my own rehab program. I would write down the things that I was really bad at doing. Then I would pick one thing from the list and sit for days making my self-figure out how to make it better. I taught myself how to walk again with out running into walls. I worked on my balance all the time. I would go up and down the basement stairs, fall, and then get up and do it again. It didn’t make any difference to me if I fell and hurt myself. I didn’t care. In between bouts of being couch ridden from depression, I taught myself how to read again by cutting a thin long strip out of the middle of a blank sheet of paper and going over and over the same sentence until I could read it from left to right. I would keep doing it over and over, all day everyday. I would make myself do it until I couldn’t do it any more. I didn’t know the word “overload” was what I was experiencing when I would go blank and start to cry and throw things. I was relentless in my efforts to recover. I ordered medical and physical therapy books from the library and read about the brain. I treated my therapy like it that was my job. I had to go to that job everyday. It worked. I recommend doing your own therapy even if you have a therapist. On bad days I would throw the books against the wall and cry. I would teach myself how to speak by reading out loud to the dog. One day the little neighbor girl (kindergartener) came over and would ask me to read her a book. She didn't know I had been sick, nor did she care. I didn’t want to, but she just kept asking me until I did. She came over every afternoon. I can’t remember her name but that little girl was a heck of a therapist. That was a big turning point reading stories to the little girl. She didn’t care that it took me forever to get through a book. She just loved to sit with me and read. On good days I felt so proactive. I did this type of therapy until I lost my house. I was financially tapped out. I lost my house. I had gotten on Social Security disability just before I lost my house.

My boyfriend had gotten back with his ex-wife and I had no place to go but to a homeless shelter. I put all of the things I had left in a storage locker. I remember looking at that storage locker and thinking I could live in it. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was fully prepared to go into the homeless shelter with the drug addicts and the alcoholics when my friend saved me. The woman that saved me was the same woman that had taken me to the Billings Clinic and had moved to Ohio. She called and offered me her guest room. Needless to say I went to Ohio. I stayed 4 months on her couch until my boyfriend called and said he wanted to be with me and he sent me money to meet him in Texas. I went to Texas. He dumped me in Texas and went to Colorado. I went to Colorado when he called. In Colorado I meet several great people that are still my dear friends. My boyfriend ended up dumping me, again, in Colorado. I was homeless again. Sick, broke and homeless and proud. I had been introduced to a woman named Susan. Susan is still my “sister”. She and I took to each other right away. Susan saved my life more than once. I wonder is she knows. Susan exposed me to a woman by the name of Byron Katie. Katie had been through the same type of hell that I was going through so I paid attention to her words. Katie had developed a self-healing program she called “The Work.” www.thework.com Check it out if you need some healing. Susan helped me to like myself a little because she liked me. She was fighting her own demons and couldn’t take me into her house. She was seeing an alcoholic at the time and they needed a live in house keeper. I moved into her boyfriend’s house until the drugs and alcohol were so bad I had to leave there. I felt dirty living there but it was better than being on the streets. I tried to make the best of it. It was like living in the movie “Animal House” every day. Animal House with fistfights, and gunshots, drug dealing and alcoholics. I would come downstairs in the morning to find blood on the walls, people lying about and the smell of beer. I realized while living there that my internal hell appeared to be the same as my external hell. But it was a place to be. I cleaned house for them and killed hundreds of mice. It got to be a game, what was the dead mouse count for the day. I cleaned that place until there was nothing left to clean. I was so scared to be there. I put a dead bolt lock with a key, on my bedroom door to keep the drunks from wandering in. I would lay awake and listen to the party and hope that the guns didn’t come out again. I started looking for a new place to live the second day I was there. I ask everyone if they knew of a room to rent. Finally I got a nibble, a friend of a friend told me about a lady that rented rooms. I flew over there and begged her. She turned me down at first. I kept calling her. I told her what a bad place I was in. Finally she felt sorry for me and took me in. God bless Sherrill. What a streak of sunshine she was and still is. It was so peaceful and comforting to be living with her. She had a tremendous mother spirit and took very good care of me. I had the entire upstairs to myself, a balcony off my room with a beautiful view, a Jacuzzi outside, the glorious mountains, the creek ran right out side my window. Sherrill is also an artist so her house was very artistically decorated. Eclectic decorating, she called it; Blissful is what I called it and her. Sherrill has a schizophrenic son. He had been living in his car in the middle of winter. He wouldn’t take his med’s. So not long after I moved in he moved in with us. He was about 23 yrs old. He was fighting his own daemons. He was up all night making noise, plus he scared me. I could hear him talking to the voices in his head while he was running up and down the stairs. If I didn’t get uninterrupted sleep, my symptoms would exacerbate. I told Sherrill about it and she would talk to him but to now avail. Bless Sherrill, she found a new home for me. A friend of hers, Lois, then took me in where I stayed for the rest of my stay in Colorado. I made two life long friends from those two women. Lois greatly reduced the rent of her basement apartment so I could afford it. I will always be grateful to her for that. I had been saved, again.

I didn’t want Lois (or anyone else) to know how bad off I was so I would isolate from her at times. I know she wondered why I would not come out of the apartment for days on end but she never said a word. She mothered me also and still does to this day. Bless Lois. Lois is an interior designer so her house and the apartment were lovely. She was always getting me things for the apartment. She made me a lovely nest. The area that I was living in was picturesque and lovely. I had started cleaning houses in some of the finest homes in Aspen when I was at the animal house. I would also serve and do light catering. People liked my work and I was getting more work than I could handle. I also was working with expensive jumping horses at a local stable. I was starting to come out of it. After that restful stay in Colorado, I would move 4 more times because of getting back together with my boyfriend. He couldn’t figure out what he wanted and I was in the middle of his indecision. I would be dumped by him finally in Arizona by him and be homeless and broke again. When he dumped me in Arizona, I finally got it together enough to stop the madness. I just kept hoping that my boyfriend would ever be any thing but a liability to me. I felt I owed him a debit of gratitude because he did try and help me from time to time. Misplaced gratitude, I have since gotten years of therapy and although I still have my moments, am mentally healthy. (When I am not overloaded, then I am nuts again). Thank God for therapy.

After being dumped for the final time, another girlfriend helped me find a cute adobe house on a ranch and was in charge of riding all the horses. Another friend Peggy helped me keep my sanity. God Bless Peggy who is still, my “sister”. At the ranch I was in heaven. I lived right next to the corrals. I was feeling better than I had in years. The horses finished the job of getting most of my balance back. I fought depression constantly while I was at the ranch. I would like to believe that I did them a good job but that may not be the truth. My depression was still very bad at times. Even though I was on medication. The wrong medication I would find out years later.

I tried so hard for years, to pretend that I was fine. I have since learned that pretending takes too much of my time and energy. Because of an angel in the TBI chat, I no longer have the desire to pretend. While at the ranch I decided that I was going to try to go back into the cattle business again. I made some contacts from the “old” years and made up a business plan. I needed some venture capital. I found the money I needed. I was on my way to getting my old life back, I thought.

With a boatload of money to finance my new life I headed off to Hereford, Texas. I thought I had set my deal perfectly. I had not. I was making terrible decisions. I was doing things that I knew not to do. I went broke and had to come back to Arizona. That was the best decision that I ever made. Arizona has been very good to me. I pulled into town in a U-Haul and found a place to purchase before I could un load the truck. The desert has healed me. I have healed me. I have gotten my GED and I have gone through the state for Vocational Rehabilitation. I am now going to school to hopefully become a systems engineer and although I am still on Social Security disability, I working 2 jobs. I love life.

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