things are so much better upstairs...

... it just took time. My memory banks have been through the ol' proverbial train wreck. (that's actually doggone close, I wonder why the saying isn't simply "been through the ol' try to talk a drunk person out of driving, and while doing so, she drives the car through you", huh, I wonder) So anyway, my memory ability (the ability to retain & recall new memories, not recall the memories I had) has been steadily improving for the last 2.5 years-- it's not at the top yet, but it's DEFINITELY better. (And since I can't figure out what "the top" is, maybe I'm there, who knows ;-) )

The other part of memory is all the stored memories I had in May of '07, which was 28 years worth. Since I couldn't retrieve them, I just assumed the were lost-- that I was starting completely over again. Things like not recognizing mom & dad on day 1 of being awake, etcetera, etcetera. Well, no, it seems they weren't lost, they were merely repressed deep down in there (well, still haven't recognized mom & dad yet ;-)), and it's just taken time to even have the ability to get to them, and it takes time to recall them (it's sometimes very helpful that being labeled 'disabled' gets you twice as long on school tests). Sometimes they come back randomly, as in waking up at 2:30am and reciting the serial number off of my old favorite rental bowling ball. What's the point, Jeff: late yesterday afternoon, I took the bus back by myself from my gym and did my usual stop-in-at-the-restaurants-on-the-way-home-to-say-hi shindig. Then I came out of the last restaurant I'm friendly with, and started walking home. An older man passed me, walking the opposite direction. I thought "You know, he looks familiar... hmmm..." and kept walking about 10 feet more since I've been wrong about that before (like yesterday). Then it hit me and I turned around and caught up.

"Sir, excuse me sir, I may be way off base here, but is your name... ... Dick?"

"Yes! Oh, Mike! Hey Mike! How are you doing? I heard all about your ordeal, Mike. Oh wait, you're not Mike, you're Jeff! Yes, how ya doing now, Jeff?"

Now the reason this makes me so happy I'm blogging about it, is that this fellow Dick is a homeless man that was a drinking buddy of Jeff 1.0's, and J2.0 certainly hasn't seen him or had reason to hear of him since my saga. So that's a memory that was seemingly lost, and it took time, but it came back-- it just went on vacation (hopefully somewhere cool). And it shows that I've always been the sailor at heart, since he thanked me last night for giving him Master & Commander back in the day. "Oh... yeah... cool. You're welcome-- I guess, since I don't remember that." (I'm learning not to sweat the minor stuff)

Spokesman gig

And more that goes into the "almost dying was the best thing to ever happen to me" bucket (which is starting to overflow), I've blogged before about this new kind of gym I go to, where their machines are great for regular folk but perfect for brain injuries, and that I'm the first brain injury to go through the program. I've been asked to give several speeches for feedback on this gym (here, on the right). And since those were received so well, the owner of my gym approached me yesterday about being a spokesperson for this gym! (details yet to come, but it would be scheduled around my free time, and I haven't said 'yes' yet since I'm not sure what all it entails)

And there's no connection to any of that, but since I traded in the old brain for a new one that has an issue with central disruption of fusion ("double vision", or, as my Veterinary Medical Terminology book just informed me, "diplopia"), that messed me up BIG TIME for more than a year, year-and-a-half-- to the point we had to put a gate across the stairs since I might just fall down them. But after 2.5 years of having double vision 24/7 (well, I guess not 24, I do occasionally sleep, or blink), it's finally gotten to 'Who cares'! Yeah, so the image from my right eye is always moving in relation to the image from my left eye, based on my head's orientation, so if I look at you while rotating my head, one of you will circle the other of you... but you know what? I'm used to that! And it means I get to quip to future girlfriends that they're exactly twice as good looking to me as they are to any other guy!

What we should really be afraid of is an ULO, an unidentified landing object.