Change of Blog--new blog now on zeeva.net!

An Art of Wellness POV
 Life and times and simplification. Please check the NEW zeeva.net--totally re-created by ME! the woman who used to be known as "that poor sick brain-damaged blind woman on oxygen!"
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What’s in a Name? An Injured Brain is an Injured Brain

An Art of Wellness POV
 

We  call them TBI’s (traumatic brain injury.)  ABI’s (Acquired Brain Injury.)  Few people are calling what my brain was injured by what it should be called--CBI’s: Chemical Brain Injuries. A lot of people have those without even knowing it.

We should just call them BI’s. Brain Injuries. 

Whatever event injured a brain--the injured brain malfunctions. 

The brain is central control--and when central control’s in trouble--so's the rest of you.

Brain injuries cause physical short-circuits and disabilities. Mental ones. Emotional ones. They can cause cognitive problems, short-or long-term memory loss, the inability to "find things in your brain" you know you know, do “normal” things you used to be good at, inability to recognize faces--whatever the myriad differences of experience that people with Brain Injuries are having--they’re the same kind of hell.

It’s good we’re starting to talk about brain injuries. Brain injuries are the “signature injury” of our present wars. So many veterans are now suffering from them we HAVE to help, we HAVE to talk about them. 

300,000-plus young people disabled--"forever?" What'll that cost our country that's already broke? In medical and disability costs--but more--in our HUMAN RESOURCES?

We should be talking more talk about HEALING brain injuries instead of all these identifications, diagnoses, and dooming people to think “forever.”  

We should be focusing on healing and fixing people more than the study of the “how’s” and “why’s” of the things that are going wrong. 

When it comes to Brain Injuries--the wounds and scars are not visible.  The effects are terrifying and devastating and turn lives upside-down. But people can’t SEE brain injuries--the way they can see if you’re an amputee, in a wheelchair, a brace, a cast--or blind--like I was. Notice I say WAS. For more than 5 years. I’m not any more.

When it happened to me--in 1998--mainstream medicine believed “brain cells don’t regenerate, brain injuries don’t heal.”  I got that lecture from my father-the-professor-of-pathology when I was a teen-ager, as he sliced up real brains and prepared slides for an upcoming lecture. It didn’t make sense to me then--I asked: “If every other organ in the body has cells that can regenerate--why NOT the brain? Are you sure? Do you KNOW?” He replied “There is a lot about the body medical science does not yet know.” That was in the mid-1970’s. 

Two years after I was told “it’s permanent” and I’d “never get better,” SCIENCE did one of those 180’s medicine often does: “We USED to think...but NOW we KNOW.”  They discovered brain cells DO regenerate. Good thing I’d already been working on getting mine to do just that for two years by then. I could have accepted--like the MD’s advised me to--and given up. I could have been drugged and disabled and in a board and care.

I was on my own dealing with healing my injured brain. I was lucky. I had more education on medicine than most. I was dancer and artist and a creative out-of-the-box thinker who’d studied Human Potential, Human Development and Alternative Medicine for years.  I’d been involved in the fields of Psychology, the Arts, and Peak Performance--what a human being CAN do and CAN achieve--for decades when it happened to me. 

All the doctors said I’d never get better again and wanted to treat the many diagnoses and misdiagnoses for the many bad symptoms caused by my brain injuries with drugs.  

Just like they’re doing today. Drugs can control symptoms but they don’t FIX the cause.

And they have so many side-effects--including suicidal behaviors--but they sure make a profit for Pharma.

As a doctor’s daughter--I KNEW THAT. Most people think the “medications” are helping them. I understood the concept of treating the symptom and--as my father told me when I asked--"Isn't that just killing the messenger?"--"Well if treating the symptom doesn't work--then we have to treat more aggressively." I knew how to do research and find the cutting-edge Science that was more to my liking--non-invasive and geared to FIX the injuries and help my body and brain HEAL. I knew how to find the Alternative Medicine and the Natural Healing solutions to help my Body-Mind heal. My Spirit led the way. 

Coming back from brain injury isn’t easy. But it’s possible, it’s achievable and it can be done. I DID IT. 

We just have to change our thinking and our culture from the re-active and profitable diagnosis and treatment of “permanent-rest-of-your-life-but-manageable” chronic disease and disability to the pro-active. 

And bring back that old-fashioned “CAN-DO” attitude America USED to be famous for.

Spaghetti Gazetti: Brain injury graduates celebrate a “return to real life”

Spaghetti Gazetti: Brain injury graduates celebrate a “return to real life”: "symptoms after suffering an acquired brain injury include seeing a familiar face but not being able to remember a name, always feeling tired and struggling to accept the person you have become.

It results in people losing jobs and careers, their families, hobbies and interests. “Crucially, these are the things that tell us who we are,” added Dr Quinn.

“Any one of these challenges would be enough to face without a brain injury to contend with, let alone facing them all at the same time."

An Art of Wellness POV

Coming Back from Brain Injuries--Yes You CAN!

An Art of Wellness POV

Getting Well again from brain injuries is possible--I’m living proof. When the blind woman got her sight back and could all of a sudden see--a lot of people thought “Oh she’s ALL BETTER now.” Catching up to life after being blinded and worse from toxic chemical brain injuries takes some time. Imagine what it’d be like--to be blind for more than 5 years--years during which other people had to organize (in a lot of cases--disorganize) your life! 

One of the first things I had to do when I got my sight back was try on the clothing my sighted assistants had helped me buy. More than 5 years worth of clothing. I’d take an armload and try things on in front of the mirror. Some looked just fine. Others, I’d take a look at myself and say “OMG--they let me wear THIS?”

I went through about a dozen sighted assistants in 5.5 years blind. Some thought their job was just to hang out with me. I had friends to hang out with--I didn’t need to pay companions. I needed people who’d do the jobs they’d agreed to do for the money I could afford to pay them. Some thought it was a piece of cake, telling the blind woman that the job was taken care of. Eventually a friend who’d come to visit would tell me the job was NOT being done and I’d have to find a new assistant again. 

Getting my sight back was an intense experience. It took as much getting used to having sight again as it did to losing it. The sheer input to my brain was overwhelming. Sight is a tremendous amount of input--whether to lose or regain.  When I first lost my sight, I felt like Johnny 5--you know--that escaped robot in the movie Short-Circuit who moaned for “Innnnn-put”. I’d been such a high visual person all my life I felt literally starved of visual input when I lost it. 

Getting my sight back again was wonderful and intense--but life doesn’t stop. Less than a year later, my Mom--who’d been battling cancer’s 1-5 on the opposite coast of the country while I was battling crippling and blinding brain injuries--asked for help. And the next few years of my life became about the last few of hers.  It’s almost two years since she passed and I’m only now finding my way back to an organized life and re-developing a business that went on hold. But that’s radically changed. 

The RAND Corporation says we now have more than 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering “some level” of brain injuries. They already lived through the hell of war. Now they’re experiencing a second hell. A hell I know something about.

You can’t SEE brain injuries--but they’re a terrible thing. People thought the blindness was bad--it was. The blindness was obvious to others--dark glasses and a white cane. What was much worse was a brain going haywire and out-of-control. You can’t SEE that happening to someone and people were just not getting why I wasn’t getting it.   And why sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.  

Now I am Well. And I worry about all the very many young ’un’s we have today who are going through the terrible hell of brain injury and being offered little more than disbelief or a life-sentence of disability and drugs--like I was.  Those black-box warnings we tune out when we hear the commercials telling us to “ask your doctor about”  are coming true. Who’s ready to step up and do something about all these military suicides? 

Dr Mercola on Dr Oz Pushing the Vac's

An Art of Wellness POV

Why are TV doctors pushing the flu vac's? 
See--or hear--my POV in the previous blogpost.  

But don't just take MY word for it--here's a 
really UnCommon Sense POV from one of the 
most respected Health Pro's in the US today, 
Dr Mercola:

"Dr. Mehmet Oz, talk show host and Vice-Chair and Professor of Surgery at Columbia University is perhaps the most well-known doctors in the U.S.

In the first video, a Walgreens pharmacist gives Dr. Oz a flu shot -- which was also given to everyone in his studio audience. He states that he’s been getting the seasonal flu vaccine every year for about ten years.

But what you didn’t see in that clip was Dr. Oz stating that when it comes to the swine flu shot, neither his wife nor his four children will get the vaccine. This comes up during his interview on CNN, shown in the second video.

It’s amazing how many doctors have been hoodwinked into believing that the flu shot is a necessity.  It’s also interesting to note that when employment is not on the line the doctor acquiesces to a far healthier approach, and his wife and children will be spared the toxic burden and other potential health hazards inherent with the swine flu vaccine.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/10/13/Dr-Oz-Helps-Shill-the-Flu-Vaccine.aspx