Emma P Transcript

My name is Emma. Um, I’m from Canada, BC, or I guess that’d be BC, Canada. Um, I was 31 weeks pregnant when I sustained my brain injury. My brakes gave out on my e-bike going downhill. And I remember looking down, I was doing 30 kilometers an hour. No brakes. And I couldn’t figure out if I needed to crash or if I needed to just ride it out.

And if I was going to crash, how could I land without affecting my baby, obviously. Um, so—and then I just remember it went black. So I crashed, I guess, and I crashed into a cement barricade and landed on my head. My baby was okay. I, however, was not. My poor partner was there. So anyway, yeah, after it was all said and done, I sustained three brain bleeds, two compression fractures in my spine, a broken collarbone in four places, and maybe a couple dislocated ribs.

Because of my brain injuries, I had to relearn how to walk, and I had to relearn how to move my left hand. My left arm. Um, I was in the hospital for about, 20, 28 days, I believe. So in that time, I kind of vaguely remember like the last two weeks of the hospital stay.

And then, yeah, after that hospital stay, they discharged me and I kind of just—I came home and I—two weeks later I had a C-section scheduled. So I guess I couldn’t have a natural birth due to my head injury. Um, so they just wanted to make sure it was all good. But that in itself was also scary.

I kind of felt like my pregnancy was, like, stolen—like the last month. ‘Cause I spent my last trimester in the hospital and I don’t remember it. Um, so all like the exciting stuff that you like prep for like baby shower and like getting the nursery all finished.

I kind of had a gut feeling that my baby would come a little bit earlier. So I had the nursery finished thankfully, and I already had all my hospital bag packed and everything. So that was really lucky. Um, but yeah, I missed out on my baby shower. I—my parents were like super great with the—the whole—the whole thing.

So they picked up whatever me and my partner needed for the baby to come home to. And like it was just—yeah. And they were—they were bedside with me in the hospital, as well as my partner. They stayed at my sister’s in—in the city, so that was really helpful. And it made such a difference too.

So they were there to advocate for me when I couldn’t talk, basically. So yeah. Anyway, I think the importance of advocating for yourself—okay, so these are things that I’ve learned. Um, I guess I didn’t say that my—my accident happened in 2022, so I’ve been recovering for almost three years now.

It’ll be three years on July 25th. Um, so in those three years, it’s been really crazy. Being a first-time mom—I was doing neuropsychology tests and like evaluations, and I was actually told that I am not going to be able to return back to my job in general, um, or even return back to work in general because of all the deficits that I still have.

I’ve had my—my job taken from me, my baby shower taken from me. I feel like I get—I get punished with my symptom—like flare-ups—if I am trying to just go out and enjoy life. So I went out of my way to really push and figure out like what—what treatments could I do to get myself back to as close—back to normal as I can, um, for my daughter’s sake.

I didn’t want her to miss out on life because of, like, me and my condition. So, um, I created an—well, I—I was kind of like—started off with my own Instagram, um, my personal one, and I was just like scrolling one day, and I was like, we’ll just look it up and see what comes up. And there was so much concussion stuff and brain injury stuff on Instagram.

Um, I was so like blown away. So I was—I had people like start following me and I was following them and like connecting with them all and talking with them all. So that was really cool.

I created my own Instagram, like another Instagram, to kind of share my recovery journey for people that are like actually interested in like—for me to be able to like make connections with everybody else that are also struggling and o—other, um, brain-injured moms out there.

And what started that off was—I was—it was really early on. Um, I was breastfeeding in the middle of the night, and I was like—went on a downward spiral, and I started thinking like, what’s gonna happen later on in life? Like, am I gonna be able to, like, regulate this crazy, postpartum angry mom that I am at this point in time?

‘Cause it was—it was all still so fresh. So I—I went on Google, and Google told me that the people—that children that have brain-injured parents are more susceptible to child abuse. And that just like threw me for a loop. I was so terrified. I—I felt really alone, ’cause no one like understood. Anytime I would talk to somebody about that—what I read—they’d be like, “Oh, you’re not even like—no, we wouldn’t even consider you like brain injured. You’re too high-functioning for that. You’re okay. Like, don’t—it’s okay.”

So I felt really isolated, alone. So I started up a blog then, just to kind of like—as an outlet—to start letting my—my thoughts out there and for people to kind of understand from my perspective that just because I look okay, I am still struggling like big time. And these are all like words coming from me and my experiences to like share to people that I am like struggling.

I guess jumping back to my pregnancy and being released at 30—well, it would’ve been 36 weeks pregnant, ’cause I had my baby at 38 weeks. Um, after I had her, I kind of like fell between the cracks a little bit. They wanted me to just go home and get everything—get myself prepared for having a baby within two weeks, right?

So I—they just like discharged me and they didn’t tell me—and I don’t know if it’s normal for people not—like for the doctors to not give you any direction on how to navigate recovery so fresh after a brain injury—but in my case, they were more worried about me getting set up to have a baby, and that my brain injury would kind of like—it got kind of pushed down to the back—to the back burner for now, um, until I was ready to start focusing on it and recovering from it.

So I had no idea who to talk to. Um, I—like what therapies to take, and how long it could be. Like, there was no information at all.

So yeah, I had to learn all of that through Instagram, through everybody’s different pages and perspectives. And their experiences too were really helpful. Um, so things that I learned for like my recovery: I learned about vision therapy through Instagram and talking to a couple of people about it. My father-in-law did bump into some woman pretty fresh after I was released, and she recommended vision therapy too, but it was like really early on and I didn’t really have like the time to even put toward my recovery. At that point, I was just trying to survive and be a first-time mom.

So yeah, I was doing—I did vision therapy this last year. Um, and before that I was doing occupational therapy once weekly for about a year, and chiropractor, physio, massage therapy, acupuncture, athletic therapy, therapy and counseling just in general.

So my opinion—it is super important to advocate for yourself when navigating doctors in the healthcare world. You have—you know your body best, and if you feel that there’s something not right, keep bringing it up. You have to sound like a bit of a broken record. Um, it could open doors for connections and proper treatment.

You need to keep pushing, and if you don’t hear back, you—like I said—be a broken record, and like bring your own information to your doctor that you have found by yourself, if worst case, and you guys can sit and talk about that. I had a couple shared experiences with that. I’ve been super fortunate. My doctor has been really good actually. Um, and he gives me basically whatever—like, he really helps me out. He refers me to the right people whenever I need to, or he—like, he’s invested.

So advocating is super important to be able to get what you want at the end of the day. So yeah, don’t—don’t stop fighting for yourself ever. If you know something’s wrong and you’re not getting the proper treatment, you just keep—you just gotta, like I said, be like a broken record.

Back to the things that I do for, like, recovery sources.

Therapy and counseling is super beneficial. It’s very helpful just to have, like, a third party where you can just, like, go and vent to, and they just—it’s—they just listen. So I was reaching out. I found one counselor that I was really excited about. She—I talked to her over the phone, and she was like—she was good over the phone. And I went to go meet her a couple weeks ago, and she—after having a one-hour session with her—

She basically told me that—like, not in these words directly—but just in other words and other terms, that I—if I don’t learn how to self-regulate, I am gonna ruin my daughter’s childhood because I’m a bit of a yeller. Um, and I think that’s a normal thing for moms in general—um, just to have, like, not a lot of patience—but for me it’s magnified.

So whenever I don’t—whenever she doesn’t, like, listen to me, it gets super frustrating. And I just, like—I go from zero to a hundred. I just start raging. And she basically has told me that I am gonna ruin my daughter’s childhood and that I’m a bad mom. And I was so crushed. And I—I didn’t know what to do.

I wasn’t gonna see her again. So that was really traumatizing. Um, especially when you’re, like, going to ask for help and you get slapped with that. I—I went to her to help—like, to see if she could help teach me regulating things. Um, and she said she worked in that, but her delivery on that was just not good.

So I reached out to Acquired Brain Injury again. I came to the conclusion that if I am looking for a new counselor, I want them to be able to understand the brain injury side of things, as well as not just the mom side of things. Um, so I reached out to Acquired Brain Injury, and they pointed me to the direction of, like, a neuro—uh, neuro coach that I start with next week.

And she does, like, DBT, CBT, like self-regulation tips and tools. So she’ll be able to, like, help me out with, like, these—the emotional struggles that I’m having with this brain injury. I remember one of my neuros—like, my—after one of my neuro evals, my neuropsych evals—they told me that I need to think of my brain as something like my toddler’s brain.

He was like, “It’s not to that degree, but like your self-regulation is—it’s broken. You’ve got no brakes,” he says. And I made a joke. I said, “It’s ironic because my brakes failed and they took my brain brakes.” So he was like—he kind of, like, chuckled at that. It’s not actually funny, but it is—it’s like dark humor or whatever.

But he said that whenever I feel emotions, it’s like how my toddler does. Like, you know, I—whenever she thinks something’s funny, she’ll laugh really, really hard. And—and then when she’s mad, she’ll be very mad. She’ll, like, get, like, ragey and angry and, like, short-tempered and throw a temper tantrum. Um, so—and when she’s sad, she’ll, like, bawl her eyes out. It’s like a—such a big deal, right? Like, end of the world.

So he said to think of my brain as that—my emotions. And I see that. So I have to learn—I need to put myself in her shoes a little bit more, ’cause, like, her emotions—big emotions. I experience that too, so I need to be a little bit more compassionate to her, I guess. It’s just really hard at the moment.

So I also was convinced too that I needed some anger management.

So I went to my doctor and he said that he was really happy, ’cause people don’t usually admit to this stuff. They don’t talk about it, ’cause it’s—it’s behind, like—it’s behind closed doors. Like people don’t like to, like, come across as bad parents. So the fact that I was, like, owning up to the fact that I have blowouts and I do throw temper tantrums like my toddler does—um, he says that’s good, that I’m acknowledging it and that I want to work on it.

I just—I want to be a better mom. I don’t want to—I don’t want to yell at my kid. I don’t—and I know people do it. And I just—I just—I don’t know. I don’t want to do that. I don’t like who I am, when I get angry. So I want to do something about it. I’m gonna—I’m—I’m trying to work on it and make sure that I’m, like, changing myself for the better so she has a better childhood, because I don’t want that.

The things that I have found that help me with my recovery is I started my blog as like an outlet for myself, and I kind of use that as like my journal. Um, if—whenever I have time. Like, I—I don’t—I used to set aside time to write, but I just—now, she was a baby when I first started. Now she’s a full-on little miniature human that is, like, running around and, like, needs full-on stimulation all the time. And I’m not even allowed to sit on the phone without her screaming at me to get off.

So yeah, I don’t do it as much anymore. I would like to, but maybe I’ll start up again, when she’s in school or something next year.

So I also garden. My husband built—like he—we did a huge garden reno. So I’m outside quite a bit and I’m able to, like, invest my time and energy into something for myself, and, like, I just—I really like it. Um, I learned that this year. So yeah, that was really cool.

I also—I try to read books pertaining to my struggles. I usually am in bed by nine o’clock, depending on my—whenever she goes down. I also take naps daily. And I—I use Instagram quite a bit. Like, I’m—I’m constantly on there, but I’m just, like, trying to connect to other people. And I’ve got a whole bunch of, like, other TBI moms I talk to.

I met these two on that Facebook page. I went through a downward spiral one day and I was just struggling so hard. So I—I posted on a TBI group and I was like, “Is there any other moms out there with toddlers that get where I’m coming from?” And I met these two other women and I talk to them, like, basically every day. We have, like, our own little Facebook group.

So that was really cool. So it’s really refreshing to be able to, like, talk to people that fully get it and understand. And their—their kiddos are about the same age as my daughter too. So it’s like—it’s perfect. It all worked out really well. So I don’t regret that.

And when I am feeling like I’m going on a downward spiral, I try to give myself, like, a timeout. Or—or I will talk—I will try to reach out to somebody that can understand. And if I can’t get ahold of them, I will give myself a timeout. Um, and depending on, like, what it’s about—if I need to cry, I will just, like, bawl my eyes out. Like, obviously my body needs to release something that it’s holding, so why am I gonna fight it?

When I get caught up in my emotions and I blow up, I also try to take accountability.

Especially if it’s in front of my daughter. Like, if I blow up—I’m, like, on a rage fest, I’m just yelling at everybody, I don’t want to be touched—like, it’s because I’m overstimulated and there’s just—nothing can calm me down. I just need to just—I’ve—I’ve left. I’ve, like, physically, like, hopped in my car and drove away once just to kind of, like, decompress.

So—and if that happens, she feeds off my energy. So I always try to take accountability and I will—after I’ve calmed down or, like, I’ve—I’ve learned to not blow up—I just have to, like, go and take a timeout for myself. I call it a reset too. So that’s really helpful, um, where you just take a couple of minutes to just, like, gather yourself, ground yourself again, and then you can go back to the situation.

So I will always say I’m sorry, especially if it’s around bedtime, ’cause usually it was.

I have also learned, though, that—so I’ll—I’ll come back to that. I—I blow up at bedtime because my daughter is just, like, so, like, amped up to not go to sleep. So I’ve learned that I—it’s the noise sensitivity that—is what sets me off.

And so I was given a tip of advice to use my Loops, ’cause I use my—I have Loops that I use for noise sensitivity if I go out for, like, outings with friends or whatever. So I was always a little bit embarrassed and, like, mom guilt for wearing them at home in front of her. She obviously is so young, she doesn’t know what it’s about and what they are.

But in my head, it’s like—I feel really guilty, ’cause, like, why do—why should I have to wear earplugs to listen to my—to be able to, like, hang out with my daughter all day?

So there was that aspect about it. And the mom guilt is a whole different thing that I—I’ll get into.

But I have just—I’ve accepted it lately. And I’ve been using my Loops for bedtime with her, and there’s been no fights before bed. I’m not yelling anymore. She’s not overwhelmed and overstimulated either. It’s like—it’s really nice.

So it’s been really refreshing, actually. I’ve—I’ve been—I’ve been enjoying bedtime and, like, quiet time with her now. So we can read a book and not have, like, the background noise set me off or whatever.

I’m finding that, like, raising a child and the challenges that are coming with it—as she’s getting older, I’m finding she needs a lot more stimulation. And because of my injury, I need a lot less.

So I struggle a lot with that. Um, and as I said, I struggle with regulating my own nervous system. So how am I supposed to regulate my own nervous system and teach her to regulate her nervous system at the same time? So I’m still learning how to do that. That’s a work in progress.

I thrive off routines and schedules. And since acquiring my brain injury, I’m finding that it’s because it’s all predictable and that I don’t need to use up all of my brain power every day.

I can’t help myself thinking that—what kind of mom would I have been without my brain injury? Would I have been like this? Would I have been a little bit more, like, understanding? Am I going to pass down, like, generational trauma because of all of this stuff?

Like, I’m—am I gonna start a whole new level of generational trauma because I’m—I am, like, learning and she’s also learning how to be on this planet, but I’m, like, relearning how to navigate this new world of brain injury?

Am I gonna be able to go to her Christmas concerts and talent shows and dance recitals when she’s older? Is she gonna be able to have sleepovers? Because I—I can only—I can only handle, like, one. I can barely handle her right now. Like, how am I supposed to handle, like, a big group of them in my house?

Like, um—I don’t have any of the answers to these questions. But I have done everything to ensure that I—or, like, prepare—I’m learning how to prepare myself for that stuff.

So, like, vision therapy really helped with that because that helped my overstimulation problem. And I am now able to, like, go out and be in public and not be written off for a week. So I am confident that I will be able to go to her dance recitals and her, um, like, talent shows or whatever at school and all of her things.

Being a mom—she has given me all of the motivation that I need to get up and, like, continue on with my day every day and look for ways to, like, better improve myself. If it wasn’t for her and my partner, I don’t know where I would be, honestly. And it’s scary to think about, ’cause, like, there’s—there’s some days that it’s, like, really hard to get out of bed, and I have to because I have a little person relying on me.

So yeah, I don’t really—I—and I enjoy her relying on me. It’s a fun time. Being a mom is a great time. I would do it all over again. Honestly, I’ve learned so much.

But I feel like one of the downsides is, like, you get pushed to, like, the bottom of the list, um, because you, like—you look fine. You don’t have, like, an actual, like, physical, like, thing to show. You don’t have a cast on your arm to show that you’ve, like—that you’re broken.

Right? I used to walk with a cane. I used to need a cane, but I—I don’t anymore. And people look at me as if I—because I don’t need a cane anymore, I’m back to normal. I’m totally fine.

So yeah, I feel like I’m a little bit undeserving of help for—sometimes because I—there are worse people out there. But I—you do count too. So don’t ever forget that.

I get discouraged sometimes. Like, I even fall in the “you look fine” trap. I feel like I do look fine. I look okay. And there’s mo—there’s some days that I do function better than others. But after a couple of good days in a row, I get slapped with these bad symptom flare-ups, and I am right off.

I also find that sometimes you have to prove yourself to your medical providers in order for them to take you seriously. Um, just because you look fine, but—I don’t know. You have to almost over-exaggerate it a little bit, maybe, um, for them to take you, like, seriously.

But yeah, I don’t know. Hopefully this is helpful for everybody. So that’s basically my experience—is me being a first-time—uh, first-time mom with a brain injury.

Yeah. It’s—it’s definitely been a wild journey and a wild ride, but I—I would do it all over again, honestly. And I’m learning so much about this new self that I probably wouldn’t have, like, ever learned being, like, the old Emma.

So—and I’m really learning to, like, slow down. I think that’s the lesson that life has, like, thrown at me—is I was always needing to be moving and, like, going and doing something and there was no ever time for a break. I was really, like, focused on my job and not really—I feel like I was—I used to be really selfish and, like, I was mean because I was just so dedicated and only a little—like, certain things mattered. And, like, now…

I was a people pleaser back then. And I now have learned to not be a people pleaser, and to, like, please yourself and your own little family and do what’s best for you and slow down and take the moments in, because you don’t know when your next—when your last day is gonna be.

I mean, you were given, like, a second chance at life.

So make the best of it, as shitty as it is.

You just—you gotta look for, like, the little glimmers and the little shimmers in life every—in your everyday. And that should help.