b) obscure

The challenge in talking with neurologists about brain injury is that we know more about the bottom of the sea than we do about the function of the brain. There is little known in comparison to other body parts. The brain and its capacity to function remains largely a mystery. If you brake a bone, or have a knee problem, Western medicine can take an Xray, or a scope, and they can give you precise feed back. With TBI it’s not so simple. The most you can do is a get a basic idea of what has happened, and then work with a general idea of what to do or not to do based on general ideas of what has happened with other people in the past. An MRI or a CT scan can detect a bleed or a hemorrhage, and then you can later undergo a neuro-psychological examination, and then they can give you a general idea of how well your brain functions in comparison to other people with generally similar socio-economic and generally similar educational backgrounds. They cannot, though, give you an exact reading on where you’re at and/or where you should be. Every TBI is different, and all individuals, due to age or genetics, experience a TBI differently.
In light of this obscurity, the old school neurological approach is to err on the side of caution. In recent months there has been attention drawn to “mild” and “moderate” traumatic brain injuries due to life complications suffered by many of the aging NFL veterans. Due to the fact that many sports, such as American football, encourage athletes to “tough it out”, recognition for TBIs are most often unaccounted for. Part of the difficulty in dealing with a head injury (especially mild to moderate cases) is that there is little account for it, and, quite simply, people don’t want to use their healthy brains to think or talk about it–just as people don’t want to talk about the topic of death, or, happy newlyweds don’t want to talk about the topic of divorce. Just like anything, there is a rift between those who know about the effects of brain injury and those who don’t; those who they have experienced or have had or seen someone else experience the aftermath of TBI and those who can’t or don’t consider it. There are nuanced yet significant effects of TBI. If a few wires within the walls of your house were cut, and you walked into the living room and sat in you favorite chair and reached to turn on the reading lamp above and nothing happened, it would probably change your “favorite” relationship. Yet, people would drive by; they’d see a few lights on in the house and think to themselves “They’re fine, everything looks normal. When’s Scott’s next race?” Ther majority of people who know little about TBI and have never had a friend or family member go through it. Until a few months ago I was one of those. In the process of trying to understand TBI, while simultaneously experiencing the onset of the symptoms, the stories and accounts told to me through this website and email were invaluable. (THANK YOU!)
The mind is a beautiful thing. . . and even with the few symptoms that I have had, resulting in incapability to experience things as I had in the past, I was made aware of the infinitesimal amount of things going on and through your brain, even in the most mundane experiences. This, rightly so, should be prized and taken care of. . . perhaps erring on the side of caution to protect.
This past summer, being told that my season was done and that I was then (and still so) within a dangerous window of time and that I should NOT do anything to put myself at risk of another head injury, I still rode my bike. I strapped on my Road ID and irrationally hoped that it would somehow protect me from hitting the ground or getting hit by a car–it DOES however make me safer (knock on wood) post-incident. This gave me the courage to go against the doctor’s orders. Though, I remember rolling out west of town on a narrow, twisty road thinking “Man, this is dangerous.” Then, the next thought, “When has this never been?”