Background
In high school I incurred a number of serious traumatic brain injuries (TBI's) from various shenanigans. The first resulted from a skateboarding accident and was not too serious relative to those that would follow. I wound up having some confusion for the weeks following, and I remember vomiting after this experience (kinda gross, sorry). About two months later, I went to some local hot springs with a friend. As I stood up to leave, I fainted due to dehydration and fell directly backwards onto the concrete, head hitting first. This was the most intense of my three notable TBI's and resulted in the total loss of memory for roughly two weeks on either side of the accident. I did not recognize my family, I could not remember who my friends were, and I still think it to be somewhat of a miracle that I recovered without major cognitive impairments. If you can believe it, I managed to rack up one more major concussion before fully recovering. This time, I was driving to a concert with some friends (about 6 months after the hot springs incident) when I hit some black ice on the highway and totaled the vehicle I was driving. This, once again resulted in a significant memory impairment, a lot of personality dysfunction, academic challenges, and roughly a year or more of recovery. Conditioned Stimulus
One of the few things that I remember from each of these accidents, is the moment just before they occurred, and the physical sensations that I experienced just afterwards. Most notably, the extreme jolt that occured as my head made contact with the concrete/windshield/etc., the flashes that seemed to blur my vision and an extreme sense of nausea that followed.
Conditioned Response
So earlier today, I was at a friends house to say hello. Because the weather was so nice, we went outside to throw a football around for a little. On one of the throws that I caught, I pretended to dramatically roll over backwards as I caught the ball as you see some NFL players do.. only I accidentally let myself go backwards to quickly and ended up making decent contact with my head into the ground.
Luckily, we were playing on soft grass and I'm now mostly certain that I did not get another concussion from this. When this happened however, I remember feeling the jarring of my head against the ground and immediately thinking I would be concussed. Once I stood up, my vision began flashing and I quickly began feeling nauseous. All of this went away within about 30 minutes and I now feel entirely normal besides some soreness in my neck.
I'm wondering if it's possible that the very distinct feeling of having your head jarred, even somewhat lightly, and having this paired with the effects of a true concussion (nausea/vision impairment) from my past incidents could have resulted in a conditioned response today?
I know that on a potentially dismal side, it's possible that even a light bump like the one I experienced today could have elicited true physical side effects. But I am somewhat curious to know if it is possible that I experienced these symptoms more as a result of the past concussions I've had which paired the sense of jarring my head with those other symptoms. Let me know what you think, and if none of this ends up making sense then I'll just conclude that I'm concussed once again!
TL;DR: Had a few concussions in past. Jarring of head became the CS, physical symptoms of nausea and visual distortion became CR. Lightly hit my head again today and experienced those physical symptoms shortly. Is this "conditioning" at all possible or am I just suffering from denial/cognitive dissonance?
Submitted April 16, 2018 at 04:57AM by ennuidiot https://ift.tt/2qyxFoC