My Brain is Back!

I’m so excited! My new laptop was delivered and it’s like I got my brain back. Not really, but, I had a similar feeling once I realized that the compensatory strategies I had been applying to my everyday life, after brain injury, were actually working. The laptop is one of my strategies for keeping up with things in my life. It’s an extension of my brain.

This is all very exciting. However, I am quickly reminded of how difficult it is for me to take in a lot of information at one time. I already had a couple of other tasks going when a knock came at the door delivering the laptop. I was so excited about the arrival of the laptop that I completely forgot about the other things I was doing before it arrived.

That’s when I decided I had to get organized so I could complete all those tasks quicker since having no short-term memory makes it more difficult. Not impossible – just more difficult. First, I had to spend a few minutes unpacking and checking out the new laptop. However, it didn’t take long to get a little frustrated. I would have gotten a lot more frustrated had I not reminded myself that it is supposed to take some time to get it set up properly and that not everything has to be done at one time.

We didn’t order a lot of the software with it since we already had it at home. As a result, that meant we had to load quite a few applications. There are so many questions to answer when setting up a new computer and I didn’t know all the answers. I kept interrupting Larry asking questions until he finally stopped what he was doing to help me (translation – mostly do it himself).

In the meantime, I worked on my to-do list for knocking out all the projects I began before the arrival of the package. To do that I used a number of compensatory strategies outlined in our book, Brain Injury Survivor’s Guide; such as listing what I needed to do and then numbering them by importance. This memory strategy helps me move through the tasks more quickly. Before I knew it, I was caught up and back to my laptop.

Things are coming together now.