What Didn't Happen

By Christine D. King

Had someone said falling off her pony again and again and again at such a young age or at any age would lead to a spiraling world of illness and puzzling misdiagnosis leaving her trapped in her own mind, disconnected and isolated from contact, and dangerously seeking relatedness, she would have scrappily fought. But that's not how it happened. No one stopped her.

Three consecutive concussions at age seven were ignored by a medical community not yet aware of the long-term consequences of head injuries in children. In the years that followed, plagued by memory deficits, depression, anxiety, headaches, vertigo, the most debilitating sequelae was a profound disconnection from other people. Entombed in a fog of confusion she scrambled to cover symptoms, to function, and to act "normal" at all costs. Not knowing any other way she didn't have the words or context for what was wrong and she forged blindly ahead.

Over time, terrified by her own mind and body, spiraling into a mental health crisis, she could no longer hide. Lost in the wrong diagnosis, wrong treatment, and destined to succumb to mental illness she met a dog also who was resigning to his abandonment. Together they dug in and out of deep-rooted trenches to find one another, stumble into doctors who put the puzzle together, and finally understand the true diagnosis of post-concussive syndrome and its ramifications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adelaide Books Publishers
• Release date: Aug 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953510082

Christine D. King

My name is Christine King. As a child I suffered multiple concussions which eventually resulted in symptoms of chronic memory issues, depression, anxiety, headaches, and vertigo, to name a few.I received a BA in Biopsychology from Vassar College, an MSW from New York University and a PhD in Social Work from Walden University.I wrote WHAT DIDN'T HAPPEN mainly to connect with those suffering from post-concussive syndromes as well as those who know or love such individuals. I think we are the beginning of our understanding of the impact of concussions and I hope to offer insight and bridges to a highly misunderstood syndrome.As a professional, I studied trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in therapists working with September 11 victims comparing their attachment strategies with therapists working in Israel with terrorist victims. I have published in International journals and presented at international conferences related to this topic.Many years later, after continuing to unravel my own health related issues stemming from the concussions, I developed a private psychotherapy practice and taught as adjunct faculty at New York University.I am currently working on a YA novel and I enjoy racing my track bike in a velodrome for thrills.

Book preview

I started paying for attention when I was young. I wanted to be important. I wanted to ride horses, go to the Olympics, and be better than my friends, rivals, competitors. The more my parents paid for horses, tipped trainers, and paid for lessons, the more attention I got. The more attention I got, the better my skills got. The better I got, the more important I became and the more I felt I existed to other people and myself.

The black hole of losing connection from others snowballed with the concussions, it likely started with them, but it’s always hard to tell. When you’re a child, the start is always the now; there’s no sense of before. The present-mindedness of childhood, confuses my sense of before and after my concussions. When I fall from a horse, feel my head bounce from helmet to skull, it confuses my senses like butterflies dancing, intertangling, fluttering together where I can’t identify one from the other. My need to be important intensified after the head injuries, but even before, I saw how it worked, it just didn’t matter as much.

I graduated to the next level of paying for connection with trainers, grooms, tutors, to psychologists. By the time I was a teenager, the gaping vacuum inside of disconnection, confusion, and chronic sensation of losing something that I couldn’t identify led me to believe that my elixir resided in a therapists office. I believed or knew something was wrong with me and I fell into the easy seduction of the attention of psychologists. Every contact offered the possibility of connection and intimacy. I entered calming office spaces and with desperation opened my heart to soft, kind looking professionals.

The connection to psychologists was fleeting but addictive. I couldn’t focus in school, math was impossible, I was depressed, my mind wandered, I was anxious. The school suggested it, but the more I went, the more attention I got. The more my parents paid, the more therapists seemed interested in me, made extra time for me, made me feel smarter than I felt. But they too couldn’t find what I lost, what I was looking for, what was wrong, and the more I went the worse I got. No matter how kind, skilled, or nice, they couldn’t break through the dark wall surrounding me and over and over again I was left in my dark void unable to reach anyone and they were unable to reach me.

By virtue of the nature of any relationship in its variability and progression, paying for attention has a rate-limiting factor, a bell-curve, a peak and a crash. Whether with riding trainers or therapists, the other person, at first seemingly interested and engaged, eventually over time loses interest, patience, or skill, and moves onto someone newer, wealthier, more interesting, leaving me alone again until the cycle then repeats itself by changing the trainer, pony, horse, or therapist. With each new start, a new promise and hope of success, winning, healing, health, respite.

This pattern, problematic with riding trainers because of squandered money and childhood Olympic dreams, is more malignant with therapists who, because of lack of skill, financially driven motive, or both, held and even dangled my precarious mental health at the edge of a rocky cliff. When I kept getting worse, the only thing that made me feel safer was to paradoxically be sicker, to get more attention, and to up the ante, beg for help, and feel closer.

Cleverly, crazily, desperately, I developed symptoms to cover symptoms. Unknowingly, I clambered to cover up deficiencies from concussions and head injuries. I appeared to be someone I wasn’t and was assumed to have had experiences I did not. I would make up stories to please therapists, win approval, find answers that weren’t the right ones a snowball of psychopathology originating with my head injuries, rolled and rolled triggering an avalanche of psychopathology and diagnostic confusion.

It escalates and peaks at twenty-two, lying on my analysts’ sofa, she sitting behind me, hidden from view and almost existence, I’m in a dreamy-foggy state. Like the fugue of early morning, where you slip from and slip back into half-sleeps, not sure what’s real, too tired to wake too scared to go back to sleep, a state I spend more hours in than out of. This is my state now. While most things walk this dreamy line of real or unreal blurriness today, here, now, it’s more. Rigid, with my back like a board, and hands tucked under my legs, my protruding, bruised sacral bones and spine are pained and poking through their anorexic skin.

Her voice moves closer. The small dark office lit only by a standing lamp and a desk lamp warm against the frost on the windows. It gets warmer, or I do, because I feel her move closer. Her change in space catches my attention before her words, I have something important to talk about. Shocking me out of the fugue, like a Christmas present, or a Pandora’s box, there’s a long pause, some breaths. Thinking this is my big breakthrough, my Timothy Hutton moment from Ordinary People, I get excited waiting, holding my focus to hear, You’ve been abused. Do you know that? Or do you remember being abused?

Floating into embers of panic and confusion, it hits. This is NOT my Timothy Hutton Moment, she is NOT Judd Hirsch and I have NO idea what she’s talking about. Freezing, the fogginess swirls like swatting at cobwebs only to get entangled and stuck with wisps and knots. This is not the present I am expecting, not sure what that would have been, this is not it. Silently screaming, WHAAAT and NOOOOO inside my head. A furnace of rage builds inside making my already too small skin feels tighter. There are lots of things I can say or do. Laugh, run out of her office, say she’s crazy, say I was concussed massively when I was seven. Three times. Blood dripping from my right ear. There’s a neuropsychological report to explain these symptoms. An osteopath a few years ago could feel where the concussions were. I can even say WHAAAT or NOOOO out loud. But I can’t. I don’t say any of those things. Because I’m confused, she’s the authority, she must know, and while I know something is wrong with me I don’t know what it is. She must be right.

Emaciated, foggy, vertigous, headachy, forgetful and blurry eyed I am silenced by myself. Not knowing my symptoms are from my concussions, not even thinking of my concussions, a past closed chapter of my life, I’m drawn into her seduction. Wanting more of her warmth and her sudden closeness that comes with her assessment, I stop breathing for a few moments. My heartbeat is loud in my head, or maybe it’s the thumping of subwoofer in a car on the street. I can’t tell the difference between the inside and outside of my body. My vision tunnels. With the pulsing and pounding growing louder, in my head, the heat of rage and acceptance building and passing, I turn her words over and over in my head. I can’t remember being abused, but then again, my memories are like locked and unlocked file cabinets randomly opening and closing and I don’t have the key. Unable to call on my memories at will, they call upon me ethereally, like fog sliding between uninhabited mountain passes. Clarity and memories unpredictably move in and out like discreet weather patterns over changing topography. Spotted, screened, blurred, then flashes of clarity for days or weeks, then headaches, dizziness, fogginess, forgetfulness governed by their own arrhythmic pulse. Maybe she knows and maybe I don’t. Maybe I need to believe her.

My concussions don’t leave me with the catastrophic brain injury that leaves you immediately injured, or damaged. It’s an insidious pinprick of damage that no one can see, I can’t feel, and no one can know. A double secret my brain keeps from myself and the outside world. Over time a delete button through certain aspects of my life. There’s a black hole that robs me of learning specific tasks like math and foreign languages and sorting cards on a neuropsychological assessment. The big things too, like the order of life, leaving me without cohesion, and my life experiences discontinuous and unglued. Struggling to hold memories as well as experiences of feeling safe, met moments of clarity that fade like the fog to dawn.

That pinprick black hole becomes a vacuous space that begs to be filled in by me and by everyone else who sees something’s wrong. Something is wrong. I need to fill in the hole. This is what she is doing now, filling the hole and I let it be filled in, because even the wrong answer is better than no answer at all. Anything is better than the emptiness of not knowing. And briefly, just for a blip of time, there’s the relief that someone may know what’s wrong with me and even if I disagree with her, maybe, just maybe she can fix me. For a moment of respite, with no understanding or concept of the trajectory of my accepting a falsity, but enthralled by the attention, intimacy, and flicker of hope, I bite from the poison apple that will possess me and hijack my post-concussive syndrome into a great confusing psychopathological monster.

My analyst is pitching me the wrong assessment of my problem, and my accepting it falls perfect into my experience of having post-concussive syndrome. Because the problem of having a brain injury, let alone a brain injury you are unaware of, is you don’t remember and you don’t know why you don’t remember. Not remembering becomes so much a part of you, your skin, your essence, that you compensate by filling in the gaps of time, dates, names, people, events. You live your life, building layers around the unremembering to cover for it, because there’s more of that than the remembering. When an analyst, an authority, says something must have happened, it’s easy to accept it as a truth, albeit her truth, because your very own truth is tenuous. Vulnerable to suggestion and influence, it would have been just as easy to hear I was an alien. My own fragile truth is easily swept away.

This false truth happens in the midst of a firestorm of a revolution of sexual abuse diagnoses, some valid and justified, some suggested and false. In the 1990’s, people like me, who were not abused, vulnerable to suggestion because of many reasons including deference to authority, anxiety, and depression, in my case and potentially many others, head injuries, then found themselves in the midst of the wrong diagnosis, the uprooting of their life, the wrong treatment, and bigger problems than they started therapy with. In the years to come, in the late 1990’s, this will be followed by a backlash of false memory accusations, lawsuits, and uproar in the psychological community. At the cusp of this psychological zeitgeist, I don’t know or understand that my brain, which slammed against my skull during my three concussions, like Jell-O falling from a roof, was sheared in microscopic tears that would govern and elude both me and the medical and psychological community for years to come. I didn’t know my symptoms, so diffuse yet characteristic of head injuries, had a cause or answer. No one did.

I know I’m in the fog. A fog that comes and settles around me like a thick wool blanket restricting me from thinking or moving. Maybe if I follow her, even if it seems dark, she can help me. The silent noooo in my head never reaches my voice. Deferring to her authority and her longing for her intimacy I mumble, Yes, maybe.

Sitting up dazed, she’s smiling. Her hard-pointy face has softened. We’ve just exchanged presents, she’s gotten the answer she wanted, I got the warmth. My acceptance of a falsity has been reinforced. A closeness of feeling special to her and the space between us is magically electric. I feel an us pouring over me. I want to give her more of what she wants to get more of this hit, attention, softness, connection, her. What I’ve agreed to doesn’t matter; she cares about me. Starving in the echoes of my bruised, cut, bony body she gives me importance and connection. Even if it’s all wrong, I want more.

Leaving her office, feeling the complex quagmire of being between what is right and wrong and my brain is holding onto the wrong. I am working at owning her accusations of abuse. It has a name and a label. I can hold onto it, to her. She’s my savior and I am special to her with all of my failures, forgetfulness, and missed ability to reach my expectations. With her diagnosis she gives me an out, an excuse to collapse and throw up the white flag with my weak, bony, and self-inflicted gashed arms. The reason doesn’t matter, only the invitation, and I grab it silently like a drowning child clawing and clinging to the very water that’s consuming her.

CHAPTER 2

After the age of seven, my post-concussive emotional and physical decline is marked only by reflection. In real time it’s subtle enough that no one sees it.

There’s a secret built into the transition that I have to keep close. The secret that something is wrong with me. Not the kind of secret built on complicated, fancy psychological processes of repression, denial, or dissociation, but one built upon a brain injury. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, the world around me is blind, and I’m terrified that no one can see what I’m hiding. That I’m hiding. I’m also terrified of them finding out something is wrong with me. In the possibility of something really being wrong with me, I don’t feel hope for resolution but terror that it can’t be fixed. I’m so scared of losing my mind that I hide it. Maybe it will go away. I hide it so much I don’t know any other way. This is normal to me.

Because the secret develops slowly, insidiously, and near-perfectly over the course of years, there is no way to link my unraveling to the concussions. There is no medical understanding of this process. But holding the secret from the concussions that my brain is injured is like sneaking a lion cub from the wild into your bedroom. At first, like a kitten, it’s manageable, even curious that no one notices. The way my thoughts trip over themselves, or the kaleidoscopes of colors flashing in my head, behind my eyes, how voices are sometimes garbled and nonsensical, and the earth beneath me seems to move like a constant gentle ocean, how I space out into nowhere for endless periods of time, how I hopelessly search for words and have to find substitutes like an internal thesaurus. The lion cub turns into a ferociously scared beast in my room, in my head, only I have no memory of how it got there and I don’t know what to do with it.

CHAPTER 3

1980. Seven years old. Since the moment I sat on a horse, I wanted to be in a horse show like my neighbors. I worshipped their photo and ribbon-lined walls of awards and ponies, their ponies. I idealized their ponies for their flashiness and fancy white socks and blazes. My pony, Pillow, is feisty, nippy, and a wonderful snowy and dapple gray. I love her. I love being at my first horse show.

Pillow feels slippery beneath me from all of the saddle soap, boot polish, bright blue conditioner that makes her coat whiter. Her braided mane feels foreign and offers nothing to grab. But, I’m now a rider like my cool neighbors. I can’t wait to show them pictures and tell them about this. Maybe I will get ribbons. Maybe I will win. But maybe none of these things will happen—I don’t have the coolness and relaxation on my face like them. My stomach is squishy from butterflies and anticipation. My brow wrinkles, trying to figure out what I am supposed to do, where I am supposed to be. I want it, but I have a voice of doubt, even now.

Into the transition of gaits, Pillow spooks. She ducks her head and kicks out her hind legs. She goes right, I go left. Squeezing with my legs, I can’t hold on. My riding helmet propels off my head as the ground hits my face. The ground hits my head. The ground hits me.

Trying to breathe in, I can’t. The muscles in my lungs won’t move. The harder I try, the less air I get. I try to yell, but no sound comes out. Horses and ponies gallop around me. Curling up, feeling dirt and maybe rocks in my mouth, I want to get up, but I’m still out of breath and I can’t.

I uncurl my body as my trainer runs toward me; there’s a man in a uniform with a stethoscope and my mom. I lean my head down. There’s blood dripping into the dirt below my face and the sensation that some part of me is pouring out, leaving my body, and I cannot stop it. Scared I will lose all of my blood, I cup my nose as if catching the blood will help me feel in control, but it doesn’t help.

The man in the uniform squats next to me. My mom’s hands are over her open mouth. Speechless, her eyes are tearing. My trainer is telling me I am ok and to get up. The man with the stethoscope says to stay down. My trainer has the most authority here, I want her to be happy and get up and assure myself I am fine. I want to get back on my pony.

My breath coming back to me. Able to breathe, I feel the continued cool slipperiness of blood coming out of my nose, my tongue rolling around in my mouth meets sharp tooth edges that hurt with the contact. I’ve swallowed the rocks. Feeling the jagged teeth, I now realize they are tooth chips, not rocks. The horses in the distance are spinning, and the edges of my vision are blurry, maybe black in spots. I stare at the ground because it’s the only thing not moving.

As they walk me out of the ring, the man with the stethoscope talks to my mom about going to the hospital in the ambulance. The ambulance? I keep looking at the side of the ring. My trainer tells my mother I need to get back on my pony. A groom is holding Pillow’s reins and standing next to me. There’s a smell and taste of hot burning copper behind my nose and eyes.

No ambulance, I mutter. Surprised and pained, my jaw locks and then cracks as I mumble these few words and try to move my mouth.

No one is listening, or they can’t hear me. There’s an invisible, impenetrable bubble around me and I can’t connect with them and they can’t connect with me. Before I know it, the emergency room’s flooding odors and blinding bright light compete with a copper taste. I can’t identify a source or location, but just know it’s from deep inside. A young doctor is saying words that I’m tuning in and out of. Mostly slouched in defeat, my once polished boots and clean jodhpurs now crusty with blood and dirt.

Blinding brightness from a penlight burns my head. He moves my neck and asks me a few questions about my name and where I live. Talking over me to my parents, he uses words including concussion, broken nose, and chipped top front teeth. My father is there, but I don’t remember him arriving.

I hear the doctor tell my parents to keep me awake, but I don’t understand why. I assume it’s so I don’t die. My parents argue with each other in tone more than words, with the few words including my father insisting I need to stop riding and my mother saying it was an accident. Their tones are fierce. Needing to be fine, scared that riding might be taken away, I try hard to focus and be fine. To will myself to be fine. The doctor says I can’t go to sleep for six hours, to bring me back if I won’t or can’t wake up. Does that mean dead?

Because I ask, he says I can ride the next day if I want.

I go home scared and pretend to myself that I’m fine. Disoriented, confused, and desperate to cover my fear and apparent injuries, I need to convince everyone of the latter so I can ride, I push away any attempt at comfort leaving no one there to help me, hold me, get me to sleep, assure me I won’t die or simply tell me I am okay. But I keep hearing sound bites of the emergency room doctor and imagine myself slipping off to sleep for the last time. Blinding pen lights that aren’t there anymore flash in my eyes.

I WANT to sleep. I don’t know how to stay awake and I don’t know why I have to. But I’m so scared if I go to sleep I may never wake up. I pinch my legs until small red blisters form under the skin, the pain keeps me awake. The TV is blaring to keep me awake. Colors on a screen, not understating the images or voices. After the six hours my mother says I can go to sleep. I am scared. Who is to determine that a minute ago if I went to sleep I might die, but now if I go to sleep I will be fine? I am afraid to go to sleep. I sleep and make myself wake up throughout the night. Checking to see if I’m alive. Putting my hand over my heart, feeling the beating. Feeling the breath come out of my mouth with my hand. Still alive.

CHAPTER 4

The summer before the summer of my concussions, we move to a new house. Just a few miles away from our last house in the Northern Westchester suburbs of New York City. This is a bigger house with the pretense that we will try to fit into a world of new money and new wealth that we’ll never truly match. Our first Christmas in our new house is filled with the excitement of wanting a new pony. Under the Christmas tree, with intentional haphazardness, amongst a pile of gifts, there is a plainly wrapped gift in the shape of a book. Uninterested, I opened it last. It is a book I wanted, Hunter Seat Equitation by George Morris, but it is still a book. Not the highest on my Christmas wish list. Looking up, I thank my parents who are sitting excitedly sitting at the edge of their sofa. Their eyes glisten as they point to the book, gesturing for me to open it. Slid into the book is a yellow piece of paper and the edges of a photograph of Pillow, the pony I have been riding for the past few months. She is standing with a red blanket over her, her white and gray dapples accentuated by the red. She looks like a Christmas package, a Santa pony.

Moving slowly in disbelief, but thinking I know what is in the paper, I open it. It is Pillow’s bill of sale. Slowly understanding the meaning of the picture, the book, the red blanket, and the bill of sale, I jump up screaming in excitement of Christmas magic. Pillow is mine.

My relationship with Pillow isn’t new to me. For months before Christmas, my trainer had me riding her. I know her, her temperament and what I’m getting into. While her name suggests a sweet docile pony, she is neither. She is fiery and spirited. She nips and spooks and escapes mysteriously and frequently from her stall and outdoor paddocks. Her show name is Escape Artist; that fits her better than Pillow. I adore her because she is mine. Maybe even because she is mischievous.

In this new house, with a magical new pony in a stable just down the street, I still long for our last house. There is an echoing emptiness to the house and the neighborhood. The rooms are far apart from one another, the neighbors too far away to see. We moved just a few miles away from our first house, but still in the same school district, yet it was like we’d moved to Mars with the odd absence of the sounds of life in this new area.

I miss living around my friends from the first house. The idyllicism and innocence of the time, the friends and the neighborhood were unencumbered by expectations, gender, or identity. Our house, a classic white colonial, was bookended by a cul-de-sac and a stream. My brother, who is five years older, and I have a wooden fort in our backyard, making it a destination playdate. At four years of age, my friends and I are walking to one another’s homes to play. As a tomboy, I prefer to be outside climbing trees, being in the mud, biking, playing pirates, hunting for salamanders, and creating potions out of wild berries. The Good Humor ice cream truck stops and jingles its squeaky, drunken tune outside our home on long summer days and a line of kids quickly and easily forms in front of it.

Like characters in my play, friends each filled a niche, a need, and an archetype. With Lilla I ground up berries and mud into soup, remedies, and potions. We pour over heavy-weighted art books of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her live-in nanny lets me eat all of the French toast loaded with Aunt Jemima syrup and powdered sugar. Sometimes I easily eat five pieces and her nanny laughs at me and offers me more.

Lilla has a dangerous, secretive book explaining where babies came from. It is obfuscated and didn’t make sense. She also tells me her dad puts Oil of Olay on his penis, and we laugh, no matter how many times she tells me. I don’t know why she knows this but I stay away from him because it’s weird. Weird that he did it, weird that she knew about it. And weird that she told me.

Ryan, whose house is across the street, has a big fish tank and a pool table in his room.