neurorehabilitationFromTheTrenches

My third acciversary came and went this week. It all went Pete Tong on 16th of September, 2017. So here’s an update on my progress thus far. Double Vision This is the most wondrous of my impediments, following the accident. I’m fairly confident that the double vision is being caused by a slowness in the movement of my left eye. What most of you are seeing now is a left eye picture overlayed by a right eye picture, or vice versa; this gives you and your autonomic nervous system the advantage of a perception of depth. The absence of this data is making my life tough, especially with a damaged part of the brain that deals with coordination and balance. Not to mention spasticity affecting my gait. It has seen some improvement but I still need the eye-patch for cane-walking because an incomplete picture is more useful to my autonomic nervous system than a dishonest one.  My Harm My hand and arm will be a problem for life. I broke my Yband. I attempted to have it repaired, when I learned...

I'd like to thank Nick Lee for writing this. If you enjoy this, you are encouraged to check his website out. It starts in an old dusty gymnasium-turned-theatre in St. Macartan’s College, where Declan, the tenacious purveyor of this most excellent blog and I attend school between the years of 1994 and 2000.  There is a dangerous moment in the theatre which I never discuss with other actors. It’s too dangerous. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve known it to happen. But the first time it happens to me is in that dusty old gymnasium-turned-theatre.  I am performing in a dress rehearsal for the school play. A dress rehearsal is the final rehearsal before performance, for those who don’t know. Some say a bad dress rehearsal means a great first night. Which is bullshit. But it’s comforting if you make a balls of the dress rehearsal. It’s often the first time you wear the costume, the make up, and the lights are on you. You experience the heat of the stage. You can’t see any...

This month's article has a very specific, target audience. Namely, people who stutter. According to National Stuttering Association of the USA that's about 1% of you. I am an ex-stutterer. One of the consequences of the accident, to me, was that I began speaking correctly and I feel it's only correct that I share with you, how I feel that was achieved. Firstly, a short disclaimer; I am not a medical professional, nor have I studied anything in the area of speech. I simply find myself as part of a rare group (definitely more rare than 1%), of people who used to, but no longer stutter.  The brain controls everything; the infrastructure that is responsible for human speech involves an extensive subset of those systems. Although I don't know anything about the speaker here , he outlines the basics around my journey from stutterer to regular person (normal), although I didn't know much about that journey while I was on it.  I'll guesstimate that I was around 10 yea...

Some problem with the editor meant that I was unable to upload any pictures this month This month will see a book review of The Four Horsemen You may have noticed a pattern; that only positive book reviews make it as a subject of a coma2tri blog article. That's because life's too short to invest time reading something that might be no-good. In this case, I knew I was on a winner, having watched the conversation , upon which this book was based. As the four contributors are listed on the cover, they each, in turn, alphabetically, contributed an essay, on the subject of religiosity, all following an excellent foreward by Stephen Fry. I allowed myself to suppose that Hitchens would get his turn, by way of an essay he had completed on his death-bed. Well -- spoiler alert -- there is no such essay. It gets started, as I've said, with an excellent forward by Stephen Fry. The three :( following essays whet the appetite sufficiently, for the extremely well conducted discussion...

It's been a while, and a taste of things to come. For too long have I allowed myself to become stressed out, trying to submit an article per week. I've decided that enough is enough, so I'm lowering my expectations as follows; this is May's article and you can expect a monthly article from now on. So you can expect a new article sometime in June. Obviously any guest articles will be a bonus in the month, in which they arrive, but they've been pretty thin on the ground so don't expect many of them. This week I'll address Biokiste . This is another positive development of the corona crisis. For some weeks we have been receiving a crate (see picture) of fresh fruit and veg, One can pretty much choose the contents but we seldom deviate far from the standard offering. Every Thursday, we could receive, for example, some tomatoes, parsnip, asparagus, carrots, lettuce, mushrooms, onions and then some of the following fruit; apples, bananas, blueberries etc..  As you...

I could not have picked a better time, during which to be housebound. Oh, is it very inconvenient for you? not to be able to leave the house, or dart to the shops to grab a bit of fruit, or whatever, well, welcome to my world. Claire wonders how I do it. I just do, but hopefully I can give you some pointers that can help. My first piece of advice is around sleep. I recommend using this forced lull to improve your sleeping habits. 7-9 hours is the recommended amount of sleep a human requires in order to function correctly the next day. I recommend experimenting by starting to aim for 9, slowly curtailing your slumber daily until you find the optimal duration for you, because it's different for everyone. Further to this, I recommend adhering to the old adage, as though going to bed early and waking early will make you healthy, wealthy and wise. This has the added bonus of regulating a healthy diet, consisting of three square meals, no snacking. The secret to fending off boredom, ...

As the title suggests, I'm going to talk once more about my double vision. What do you mean that wasn't clear? OK, I'll admit it, that was a cynical ploy by me to appeal to my Japanese and Honduran readerships. More on that in the Appeal section. One of the many take-homes I had from Autonomie was a factoid I learned from my Logopädin. Namely, the reason for the ubiquitous eye-patch seen on a pirate, is not what you might believe. My memories of pirates, from my childhood, were based on the stereotypical pirate with the eye-patch and hook-for-a-hand. I put 2 and 2 together, with no google to research, and deduced that he must have accidentally gouged his eye out. I thought it was safe to assume that an eyepatch is to prevent infection of, and staring at, a wound the pirate had received or inadvertently given to himself. I could not have been more wrong. As I have since confirmed, the eye-patch was used unintuitively to give the wearer the power to see in the dark. Imag...