TBI Support group, Designated Survivor, Blokus with Papa, Poké with Papa

September 12, 2023: Starting this before the end of the day today. First thing in the morning, I messed up on my medications. I took my normal morning dosage at 6:07am with an 11g fat strawberry vanilla yogurt. Then, my alarm that I’d forgotten to turn off went off again at 8am, and I thought that I hadn’t taken it yet. So I took one more dosage, out of my night pill box in the container. I told my parents right away, since I literally realized right after I took it, and they told me that I should just eat fat with the second dosage too, and then just skip my night pill. So I did that. I decided that the yogurt actually felt a bit gross to me now, so I had it with half an avocado my dad brought me.

Then, at 11am, after I dosed a bit more, I joined a TBI support group that I’d found on Reddit I think. On the call, other people talked about not being able to process words in complicated books, and I spoke up and said that I don’t have issues with that, it’s just that I can’t seem to get into books in the same way that I did before the accident. A couple people also told me they too see it as an invisible injury, and funny enough some people said that they’d never met another survivor in person. I definitely have. My big takeaway from the meeting was that many of the people had this happen to them when they were a lot older than me, and were already married with kids. That kind of just made me feel that because this happened to me at 23, I’ll never be able to live as much of a normal life as even other people with TBIs.

Then, after the call, which went for over an hour, I decided to try a new TV show, called Designated Survivor. My dad recommended it to me. I’m not even sure if anything will happen for the rest of the day since Mayo didn’t call and I really can’t even stand up much without danger of throwing up, until my shunt is fixed. Some older ladies from the Methodist food shelf asked me to stop in and say hi today, even if I can’t volunteer, but I’m afraid that’d be too much standing for my broken body. Then later, the woman, Anne, also emailed me and said that they were quite busy today, and probably wouldn’t have had much time to chat anyways. I told her I’d love to get back, but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to stand without needing to vomit.

The new thing that happened today was actually a little bit objectively dull too. It was that me and Papa decided to play a game of Blokus with each of us using two colors against each other. It was actually quite confusing, for both of us, not just the TBI survivor. I’ve got a photo of him with the Blokus game, which I just got my deleting one of my extra BeReals earned yesterday and reposting it. At least I have the screenshots of all of them, even though I won’t be able to look back at them within the app. I should also mention that I beat him twice in the weird version of the Blokus game we played where we each had two colors. Papa and I also decided to use the one day that I don’t need to take my dinner with my 11-14g of fat for meds to get poké bowls for dinner, which I usually could never have done. We decided to get it from Poké House & Tea Bar, where I used to go because it was near my gym.

It is literally dramatically better to not have to structure my dinner around fat content. I decided to get the Aloha bowl, which I’d never gotten before, which had spicy crab salad and cucumber with sweet chili and avocado. It was still a bit spicy, even though it wasn’t one of their “spicy bowls.” I ate that with Papa, and I also ordered the matcha milk tea drink, which had boba. Funny enough, I googled the fat content in boba, just to know for the future, and it was like 1.5g for a serving.

Oh, and the other kinda cool thing I did was I finally put in some of my earrings again after the surgery. I'd never done that, or put my necklace back on. So I got both of those things done at night.

To be grateful for: Grateful that because of my mistake I was finally able to eat a normal dinner. I kinda wonder how bad it would be to do that every day.