A couple of weeks ago I got a look up on facebook.  Someone from my looooong ago past popped up in my email and said, “Hi, Krissa!”  She, apparently, was a dear friend long ago when I was a teeny teenager.  I don’t remember.

See, there’s quite a good chunk of my childhood that I don’t remember, and I have a good reason for it.  I was in a really bad auto accident a couple of weeks before I turned 15 and I suffered a head injury that was quite a doozie.   (Spell check does not recognize “doozie”, nor does it offer an alternative.)

Long story, short….ish. I had an acute subdural hematoma.  The ambulances came and got us all, (My cousin’s friend that was driving and my current boyfriend that I wasn’t that crazy over and had stashed in the backseat by himself.), and hauled us to the hospital.  I got carted to another, larger hospital after that when my ER doc assessed that I had a head injury.  My heart stopped a couple of times on the way there and all kinds of high drama stuff ensued.

Upon arriving in Lafayette, La. I was taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and Dr. Stephen Goldware was my neurosurgeon.   He jumped right in there and cranked out a blood clot.  Replaced the bit’s of skull he had cut away and stitched me up.

Before surgery he told my Mom that I had about a 5% chance to make it.  Now keep in mind that this was 1978 people.  I’m pretty sure that long ago they had just determined that the brain was located in the head.  Well, in women, anyway. 😉

No, seriously, there was a very small life expectancy for me.  So, I slipped into a coma for a couple of days after the surgery and then came awake and was paralyzed on my right side, and had lost half of my vision.  The paralysis was temporary and I recovered function slowly but surely.  The hardest thing was fine motor skills.  Eating, brushing my teeth, holding a pen and writing, etc.  This all slowly came back and a couple of years later I was only limping a tiny bit when I got really tired.

The vision loss, however, was permanent and to this day I can see exactly half of everything I look at.  It’s not exactly like being blind in one eye, because you would still have all the peripheral vision in the remaining eye.  While my eyes see fine, my brain only gets the “signal” from the right side of both of my eyes.  So, working together, my eyes only see the right half of everything I look at.  Everything.  Right down to the head of a pin.  It is very exacting.  If I look at your face, well, your nose, I only see the half of your face to my right. Your left.

This is a long, long, story and I have gone on for what seems to me EVER.  Talking about this kind of effects my mood and I don’t wanna do it anymore right now.  However, I do want to get it out cause I want to ask your opinion about something.  I will continue this, (I want to say tomorrow, but it may be later in the week… I dunno.), later.