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A new dream – What I’ve learnt

I have suffered from a very severe traumatic brain injury for eleven years now and I have been fighting back from it for almost the whole time. During these years, I have gotten to test various different kinds of approaches to brain injury rehabilitation. There has been a ton of progress in the brain science even during these years. It was thought that it’s a game over once the brain is injured. That’s not the case though and this begins to feel like the time to share my experiences on the subject.

The first things were done to me when I was laying still in a vegetative state. My arms and feet were moved a bit just in order to restore the blood flow of my limbs. Things were taken to the next level once I was able to move my limbs voluntarily. Too bad that almost all of the therapists of the hospital I spent the whole summer in were on a holiday. I couldn’t exercise nearly as much as I wanted to, as much as would’ve been very beneficial for me, but I got to work after the summer. It was a huge bummer and it still pisses me off every time I think about it. It’s better to try to forget… But things got brighter as I was granted a rehabilitation period for two months in an amazing rehab center and that’s where I got on this track!

Now, eleven years later, many things have changed. I don’t do any even kind of similar movements as I did back then, but one thing has remained – the correct movement of the body is still the treatment I trust. It’s not a panacea though. After I forced myself to do movements I couldn’t execute perfectly for years, my back got f*cked up.

Those movements didn’t just ruin my back though, I gained amazing benefits from them. Exercising them so relentlessly made me who I am today. I have no regrets. Of course… in a perfect world my back wouldn’t have gotten f*cked up. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have only done the movements I did now. I would have done also many protective movements for my spine, but I didn’t. That’s neither here nor there.

My rehab has changed now, once again. One thing I really like now is that it’s not following strictly any method – at least not any I’d be aware of. I’m working with two extremely competent individuals who are passing their knowledge to my case. I’m going back and forth between Helsinki and Tampere and they’re continuously trying   to ”one up” each other. And I’m the one gaining all the benefits of that!

I’m doing this again! Crawling…

It’s very important to have dreams in my opinion and I am a Dreamer with a capital D. I haven’t talked about this dream to anyone yet, but my dream is to found a FightBack center. A center in which all the best methods that I’ve used during this rehabilitation of mine would be represented. A center in which we would try to motivate all the clients. If everyone was motivated, we could do miracles.

And even though I am suffering of a traumatic brain injury myself, the center would help people struggling with different problems as well. The most important thing would be that everyone was motivated to do the work.

Apparently, there is no panacea for happiness, but I’m dreaming of a place in which anybody could Fight Back to live a happy life.