My Mind Me: Coping with a Traumatic Brain Injury

By CARL D. SCHULTZ

Carl D. Schultz, who served in the U.S. Army, shares a moving collection of autobiographical stories and poetry inspired and strongly colored by the traumatic brain injury he suffered while in West Germany in 1987 in My Mind Me.

His poetic, visceral voice is vivid and compelling, and the stories he shares are deeply intimate and evocative.

He wrote this book partly as an exercise to understand his past after waking up from a six-month coma. In the process, however, he discovered that his life is not as tragic as it is confused.

While he has little recollection of the two years before and twelve months after the horrific event, those three years that included graduating from college, jumping from airplanes, and sitting under the Eiffel Tower have no doubt played a critical role in making him the man he is today.

Join Schultz as he sorts through confused memories to share an inspiring story of survival, grit, and courage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Mar 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781489711205

Book preview

My Mind Me

Coping with a Traumatic Brain Injury

CARL D. SCHULTZ

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Copyright © 2017 Carl D. Schultz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1119-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1118-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1120-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901624

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 3/17/2017

Contents

Introduction

1 Goo Goo Gah Gah

2 Angelic

3 Bitter Grunt

4 Where ’Tis Not

5 Elvis Lives

6 Caffeine

7 Appearance

8 Hate

9 Hummer

10 Going to K. G.

11 Viscery

12 Le Gardon

13 Okatibbee Beach Ball

14 Pain Lukki

15 Turf

16 My Mind Injury

17 36-Special

18 Bottles

19 Yodeling Railroad Nails

20 Boys Will Be Boys

21 Sidelines

22 Pancake Proud

23 The Mowist, Not Maoist

24 Creek and Pool

25 Copper Roof

26 Daring Tasks

27 Stash

28 Copper Boards

29 Ready on the Right, Ready on the Left

30 Induced

31 Shapes and Figures

32 Feint

33 Recon

34 Slamming Sky

35 Charlie Chaplin’s Horrific Wanna-be

36 Flow and Swirl

37 Cockroach

38 Cold War Delusion

39 Java Down

40 Unique Begins Again

About the Author

Thinking of my wife and life, Deborah, and our kids, David and Sarah.

Introduction

The mind is eclectic, so contains the brain, as the brain is physical and contains everything. Seen firsthand through the mind, a traumatic brain injury initially seems to yet has no hallucinogens.

Some free radicals magically enter, unique to each survivor, often physically painful. Uninjured brain parts that survive adjust in face of the injury. If not atrophied, they further bypass injured portions in favor of performance.

The injury’s existence is difficult to control and observe firsthand—or any hand, for that matter. The survivor battles with the management of new, elusive remnants. Those that emerge concentrate, disappear, fluctuate, and confuse. Most things seem to be intermittent, like a water faucet not turned off all the way. It drips and drips, growing loud enough from the next room to keep you awake on the edge of sleep—a trickle that’s not enough for you to get up and turn off, for the first few hours anyway. It can become a normal affair, perhaps.

It is harsh physically, mentally, and emotionally, since its base is in, and thus is, the whole brain—hinting that everything observed is perceived as alive by the brain. Thoughts, using perception, grasp imagination before knowledge. Infantry immediate-action drills come to mind.

Einstein’s statement of imagination bears fruit again: Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Best to the going

Unknown to man.

Except to ones wishing

They know.

It doesn’t matter thinking

They’re there,

But there they’re thinking,

Wishing they knew

Where it’s from so while it goes

As long as it goes.

Then they leave hoping

It crumples vanished in cold,

Not knowing

What where to stroll

When it explodes.

1

Goo Goo Gah Gah

Some memory did vanish due to my brain injury’s physically acute nature. Many inborn machines or techniques to retain memory were destroyed or lost. The same difference proves that six of one can be half dozen of the other.

A shiny steel golf ball, nearly a ball bearing, smooth as glass, appears brusquely in spirit. It’s clear silver like a mirror, and shows both round and smooth yet razor-sharp features. The ball keeps rolling in place, grinding down and showing its razor bands in place, digging, digging.

It nearly buries and drowns and then lifts itself up, leaving an imprint pressed down behind it as it rolls. The ball flashes in the strong, almost stiff, grey-white mush pile, and keeps its spherical shape.

It rams, pushes, and somehow props up to the light green-blue-gray mushy bumpers. Somehow it stays level with its bubble-swell that bleeds in places. Pushed into a quick reflex, the ball rolls and bounces on and off bumpers, like in a pinball machine.

Then the same orb quits its roll, slides, and slips to move itself, yet shows half its body on the bumper. It doesn’t make dings or jingly scores as the bumpers wet-pop. Reacting to draw-in like a meaty kiss, wrinkly in poetic yet absurd meter, they use exponential fractions in algebra where pole, butter, and string beans confuse themselves. They lay as fractured decimal exponents in the strainer, just to wake up as a new wrinkle.

After a bad long time, things do all they can do on the outside, but the wicked ole conscience won’t gently blow out the candle. With swirling storm winds, a mean, toothless grin hisses catlike and spits. Then it relaxes its kiss-pucker to suck and lick its thumb and bony index finger. It squeezes and tries to kill the lit-up candlewick that won’t quit its glow. So the grin screeches a wail in ecstasy and uses the mean dark-age Caucus tune.

Caucus’s Chichia Nannera erupts with a megaphone yet fails because ancient Caribbean voices and bongos get louder. They squeal a choppy song outta tune with a beat.

Singing, Hoo hoo hah hah, goo goo gah gah, the voice moans, screeches harshly, and clicks fast Deutsche-like with fists. Auctioneers scream, bunched up in a small mega-stained, formerly white porcelain bathroom. It doesn’t get Latin but Deutsche directions to its profanely raunchy smell. That means an anal, and surely rectal, balding barbershop quartet’s near. The foursome tweedle-dees with long razors in hand to change dress into sheets that prove test scores. They hit Pa’s home brew and burn crosses.

To add to being tragic and hurting in brain places, more tragically too many places show up. They have crossed eyes and brown rotting teeth that decay with inbred hate-speak, showing their true worth in study and rehab. The folk kind that other folks see but ignore over and over again in these as all days. They don’t let the bad history get written, for the victors don’t do bad.

They walk out from their buddy’s backwoods gas station on acid, with a home-brew chaser.

In a usual blank trance, they think that the stuff they slip on the concrete floor doesn’t smell bad and has a damp snuff look. So they feel it with a pointy fingertip-on-thumb rub. Since it feels smooth and a little lumpy, they wrinkle their nose, sniff, stuff it down between their lower lip and teeth like snuff, and do a rap that mixes well with the beast’s loud, pounding Gödblessedtheirdämhung opera.

That’s before translating I’m Gunna Plier-Squeeze a Hemorrhoid mixed by that loud booming guy. He’s got little wings over his ears—must be deaf—and says that he counters loner surprise surprise Nucheezee with choppers in Nicaragua. With the song he whoops, hollers, and two-step knee-slaps with a steel guitar and a homey kazoo.

Here, there, then, and now are grimy teeth and skull-and-crossbones on black hats with silver-gray piping. Coffee bad breath fogs to spit-shine the scuffed-up black boots. He’s got a triple-aught buck Miser, three-inch Magnums, and spotted spooky sheets with thick track marks like truck tires tore up that lay mushed and ignored on the interstate shoulder.

It’s there, and I see it, but I can’t read, grasp, kick, or choke, and it won’t flush. So it’s got to sit and get soft, until it sultry laughs. Then its cross-eye gaze coughs a yellow, real slick wad that’s grainy in spots.

Don’t care that it oozes from a mouth corner to drip and make look-downs. To keep from a drip, it gets the sleeve all slippery and sticky with a chin wipe.

So making sure to get empty, all the stinky brown and green skinny snakes come out with groans. A tight pushing stomach muscle inside makes them fall and circle, hiding the true clog culprit. That makes the fiend only stay hard and deep, when it won’t stop the water’s slow rise without a plumber’s snake.

Now outside whines that beep, drum, rattle, and pound loud static, wanting to be ignore-proof. But to keep on, my jaw pops to make me hear and really feel that I can’t go like before. Twisted brain wads must be it, and jumbled mind means lack-ass body. Sense slights don’t feel but stay to grow weird as they clog and unclog things. Yet bad still wants to appear with a missing-tooth grin. It’s got tobacco stains on its mouth corners as it drools and strums a banjo.

For meaning’s sake, my mind finds that it’s best to repeat myself, repeat myself, but I hear, Aw baby, yeh-yuh uh-huh, I know it, sweetie. Commenting for no reply, so no listen.

My body’s here and able to move in ways, but it feels like a smooth drum. It beats so quick that it hums and vibrates like a long lightbulb. The fluorescent glow hums all the way down the hospital nursing-home hallway and isn’t too bright to stare at.

I swing and snap-crush-crash a long skinny one on a tree. I am safe from blame, since it was from a trash pile by the church-asylum fence, right next to the newer apartments across the woods with a ditch.

Don’t breathe in the white stuff from the bulb. That hurts and looks like cig smoke, but it’s different. It’ll get me took to that mad hospital. It’s just over the tall fence that’s got a barbed-wire triple strand on top. Keeping folks out so they have to touch you in the eye so softly with an icepick.

Those six-foot-wide trees sway, bend, crack, and give yellow-green hack-loogies, showing slugs to get tasty, still salted on the hot concrete driveway. That salt makes it easier, so around them will turn into watery Jell-O, a thick gooey spit that could soothe open-eye sleep for somebody up there.

Later on, rhyme, bump, and meter are done, since sunny sense runs off under the bed with the fizzle—the clear-brown wet-jelly fizz that smells like dead rot you can see and smell float up off the road in dark waves on hot days, giving long-gone recalls. They come with her pain moans as the ooze foams and crusts the grave’s slab sides, if she’s not ash anymore.

2

Angelic

Other side, bloody turd Leg, the black-hat instructor yells at the lieutenant. Take charge. Nobody else does.

Take charge, Schultz, the lieutenant says to himself. Sumn done day in, day out, no matter the place or the mess.

Take charge! Make sure you keep on a side and get rid … eye infect … He blinks at his clock with the ongoing worry that his troops have gathered already, reads 5:16. You’ve gone more … days with nix sleep, Leg.

Oh Carl, come here, she whispers into his ear while he drowses.

Don’t, Leg, all you do is make yourself worse. Get your cute Leg ass down and go after Beijing!

The settled consciousness vanishes and gives room to a drumroll of horrid spirits.

So you think you got it bad, huh, Leg? You got it easy, since you’re a stick leader and a high-class infantry offsir. I even seen you with a Steve Headandplay book at the chow hall before a few push-ups. If you think he ends sad, you haven’t worked yet. Come here, Sergeant.

Sergeant … Sergeant! Come look here, the black hat screams in delight as he gets others to gather.

See them? Kiss some more earth, Leg, loudly drawls the black hat, inches from the lieutenant’s face, once Schultz recovers from push-ups.

Wait, ain’t those air assault wings on your garb, Schultz? the black hat screams while he notes, in humor, the hard-earned badge on the lieutenant’s chest.

And ain’t it so cute, Sergeant? Precious on him. I noted that pop-top on sweet’s garb back in ground week, yet one more black hat chimes in, to scream at the week-old wing sight.

Ooh yes, Carl, she erotically exclaims, to signal fruition.

So because you’re a offsir who slides down ropes outta choppers, you’re better, huh, Leg? All I can say is you ain’t seen a damn thing yet, Leg-on-a-rope.

You’re sorry? All of us could have told you that, non-airborne turd, the black hat states in eloquence. It looks like you want to be down here all damn day, huh, dope-on-a-rope?

I didn’t say you could get up yet, the black hat screams, ready to make Schultz roll over to begin a leg-lift routine. ’Member that car wreck, hung-out-to-dry Leg?

Hurts, don’t it? Good, if not you would swim somewhere too. The black hat tries to show crux of sumn other than a parachute landing fall and push-ups.

I sure in hell won’t be here six damn months, but I’ll try more to put you in ’nuther li’l coma … And I’ll lean down to tell you this, in your real-cute speak. Damn, your mouth looks like it wants sumn.

So we’ll be back just for your dear li’l rope-a-dope ass, the black hat whines.

Wake up, we’re almost there. Carl leans over as he keeps his eyes on the road to smell her fragrance.

Where are we, Carl? she angelically murmurs in response to Carl’s statement.

Is this a trick question? Carl responds in jest.

Huh? More awake than Carl realizes, she tests his faculties on this rural drive.

Sh … scuse me, I had to say that. I think the dern espresso crashes. Carl admits to being tired, since he just got back from his field duty a few hours before.

Trees, so many trees. It looks like we’ve gone deeper in the woods, she says after a mere glance through the windshield.

Prob … heck, I’ll stop here and knock it out, Carl answers with the sarcastic word game.

"I thought we were going to wait until Cades Cove to get