Keep Trying

By Joseph Reidy

This book details a lot of my recovery efforts from basically dying, because I know that nobody likes to call it that, but that's what happened. I died once when the car hit me, then again when I had my first bigger seizure, then I had another big seizure iin the MRI tube. I actually found out that I had been having "mini seizures" for 7 years before I had the two bigger ones in 2019. But this book is about recovering, recovery isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Recovering from a brain injury needs to be more widely known, hopefully not everyone has to go through what I did with my seizures. But even if they do, I hope my book shows people who are injured like I am that they're not alone!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Reidy
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215862988

Joseph Reidy

I am a guy from a very small island off of the coast of Maine. I'm fairly funny, I wrote this book to help out people going through a brain injury. I've worked hard to recover from this brain injury, which is just what anyone doing this, going through a brain injury, needs to do. If I had known many of the things in this book beforehand, I feel as though it might have been somewhat of an easier time going through this. I have a lot of ideas of things that I would like to do, own a food truck, get into comedy, own a restaurant, seriously a lot of different ideas. If I've made it through this, I know I can do just about anything.

Book preview

Keep Trying

Published by Joseph Reidy

Copyright 2023 Joseph Reidy

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy.

Keep Trying

Thank you to Ross, Nate, Chris, and everyone at AccesSportAmerica for everything they have done for me. You guys RULE!

Table of Contents

Preface

It’s No Cakewalk

Get to Living

Finding Your Way Out of the Thicket

Making a Life Plan

Getting Back into Rhythm

A Turn of the Wrist

The Job of Getting Better

Living in a Dream

The Cruelest Trick

You Really Can Do Anything

You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet

Navigating the Recovery Process

All the Time in the World

Conversations with My Brain

Finding Somebody in the World

The Benefits of Exercising and Eating Healthy

More Conversations with My Brain

Finding Neuro Bliss

A Change Will Do You Good

Finding a Reason

A Life of Adventure

Scared Spells

Pure Peace

Keep On Keeping On

Preface

I started this book around 2016 when I was living in Saco, Maine. I was about twenty-three or so and had lived on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, for most of my life. Vinalhaven is where I first went home to after my stay at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, where I had woken up from a coma after my accident on September 9, 2011.

I am currently living in Groveland, Massachusetts. This book details my journey and recovery over the past seven years.

It’s No Cakewalk

In my last book, My Nightmare…and How I Woke from It, I talked about the serious accident that happened to me when I was eighteen years old, forever changing the course of my life. I was hit by a car while crossing the street and suffered a brain injury. After the accident, I was in a coma on the brink of death. But I did wake up and have been on the road to recovery ever since—and have really been just trying to deal with life as a brain-injured person. My mission with this book is to continue to share my experience with having a brain injury and my attempts to recover.

I was just like you were before I got injured, just kind of going through the motions, doing things because I was told to do them. Well, I’ll say to you that whoever told you to do all those things was right. I have just been trying to get better from a brain injury. It’s no cakewalk, as I’m sure anybody who has a brain injury or is involved with treating someone with one will tell you. The only remedy is to work your butt off to get better. Once you do that, it will pay off, even when it seems like you have been putting in enough work and it is all for naught. That’s when you will get yourself better.

You need to try, and then after a while, you will get there—I did. It will probably be in ways that will seem very small at first. But that is just the first sign. Also, those small steps probably won’t seem all that little to you. That’s just what it takes; you learn quite a lot about yourself and about everybody else, too. What you learn is really indescribable. Unless you put in the work, you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about.

But if you do put in the work, you will really feel so accomplished one day. I can’t give you an exact time because I don’t know you or how hard you work, or how severe your injury was. I mean, it’s honestly so simple to do, but you have to do it. I’m pretty sure that’s where the crux is for a lot of people, actually doing the work it takes. I know for a long time I was just like you, lying in bed at night and swearing in my mind.

It’s just a part of the process; don’t give up if this happens to you. Everybody is talking down to themselves out of sheer frustration with their own bodies. So don’t worry if you’re talking down to yourself. I know I was frustrated with my body, too. It’s difficult, but don’t think that you need to think up some completely new way to get better. It’s honestly just work that you need to do.

I know I would keep myself up at night thinking that there had to be something that people hadn’t thought of. But what I found out is that even if you dislike hard work more than Garfield does—and I’m not going to lie, I didn’t particularly enjoy hard work—hard work is still what you need to do. There isn’t a trick to it. Despite what any other person says to you, you need to put in the work. Human beings knew once that all they had to do was put in the hard work, but we’ve all forgotten that. It sucks that we forgot, but you need to realize this fact.

There really is no way around it. Believe me, I’ve been looking and failing to find an easy way out. Every process out there has the exact same underlying principle: HARD work. It’s different when you can’t do anything like how you used to, though. But that just means that you need to do some work to get back to where you were. For me, the hard work is exercising almost every day, wearing braces every night, and doing various Bioness treatments. The Bioness is an electrical stimulation device I used on both my arm and my leg. I would wear them and usually let them shock me for one to two hours.

When you can’t do too much, you appreciate all of the things you were unwilling to do before and all those things you really wouldn’t even think about. If I actually could do some of the things that I used to be so annoyed by, I would actually be a lot more appreciative of them. Things like raising both hands above your head or reaching for something with your left hand. I really can’t use my left hand for anything besides holding something steady—that I can still do, and only that.

Get to Living

You know something interesting? I swear to God I saw