Woman shares she suffers from memory loss after brain injury

I have memory loss because I got pushed off of a stage and hit the back of my head on a piano and got a brain injury. I figured since today is March 1st and the beginning of brain injury awareness month, I would start with a story time. So like any good choir nerd in high school, I spent my free periods in the choir room. It’s where I usually ate lunch, skipped class. I was just kind of always in the choir room and one day I was in there towards the end of the school day and I was with a friend of mine and a choir teacher. Now keep in mind I’m retelling the story from other people telling me the story. I don’t really remember that day at all anymore, but I just remember the feelings I had and how scary and how much pain I was in that day. Fun fact, brains can actually hold the memory of emotion far easier than they can. The time, the place, the people, stuff like that. Anyway, so I was just hanging out with one of my girly pops and we were on the choir risers. Now if you ever been in choir, you know these risers go pretty high. My understanding while we were joking around or hanging out, she accidentally tripped me or pushed me and I fell backwards off the riser and hit the back of my head on the piano that was next to the riser. Like I hit the bottom leg of the piano not the top. So I had quite a ways to fall. I fell off the riser down to the floor and hit the back of my head on the corner of the leg of the piano. After I fell and I hit my head, nothing really happened. No one told me to go to the nurse’s office. No one, like, was too concerned. I just remember feeling super disoriented and, like, kind of sick. And this picture will always live in my mind because this was just two hours afterwards my friend Sarah came into the room and I was just laying on the floor like tired and sleeping, which I know you’re not supposed to do if you have a concussion or a brain injury, but I didn’t know. And she came down and she just, like, laid there with me until we had to go to rehearsals that evening. That’s my girl. She’s a real one. I then had to go to an indoor marching band rehearsal and I went up to one of my instructors and told them like, hey, I hit my head. I don’t feel good. I don’t know what’s going on. I just, I don’t feel right. I have a headache, pretty much. Their response was, take some aspirin. You have to be at this rehearsal or you don’t get to be in the show. And that was kind of terrifying for me. I was the Majorette. It was our big indoor event. So I went on stage to practice. Now keep in mind there are strobe lights. I’m on stage with a bunch of drums and I about 5 minutes and was like, I can’t do this. But I also wasn’t allowed to leave. So somehow I ended up in a practice room by myself, just like sobbing. I don’t really remember who put me there or why I was there, but no one came to check on me except for one of my teammates. After like an hour, finally rehearsals were over. I don’t remember leaving the practice room. I don’t remember getting picked up on my stepmom. I don’t remember going home, but my dad remembers coming home to me, sitting at the island in our kitchen over my dinner and apparently I was just like this. He said I was glossed over, non responsive and he said something was extremely wrong and he didn’t know what because I wasn’t talking. I also had to relearn how to talk after my brain injury. But that’s like a whole another story time and pretty much after that, my entire life changed. I went and saw a doctor. I was in and out of school for six months. I had to completely relearn how to be a normal person and I eventually had to switch schools because of the bullying I received from the school that I was at. And TDH the year I switched schools was the best year of high school I ever had. So anyway, March is Brain Injury Awareness Month. So all month long I’m going to be talking about sharing stories and sharing resources about brain injuries, how you can get involved and how you can get informed in your community. Me and my Boo Boo brain are going to go try and curl my hair. OK, that’s it. Got to go. Bye.