Run distance today: 41.52 km (25.8 miles)
Total distance to date: 2579.01 km (1602.52 miles)
Song of the day: don’t remember (not a song, I actually don’t remember)
Today’s run was very hot. It peaked at 31°C (68°F). I have not had another reoccurrence of heat stroke as I have changed my fluid intake to include a specific sports drink that replenishes the fluids and sodium I go through during such a vigorous and long physical excursion. As I have to get up again tomorrow I work really hard on making sure I recover properly from the day before. I also need to make sure that I don’t work myself too hard today, or else tomorrow I will not function very well.
At 3:18pm there was a 5-minute downpour. Heavy drops of rain fell right after I stopped to rest from the heat. It was not refreshing. It was like a hot shower in the sun.
I also said “bonjour” to a couple of horses when I ran past their stable. There were about 4 horses, and when I said “bonjour” three of them lined up and turned their heads to face me. It was like they had practiced this and like they were show horses. Very cool and made me laugh.
I have been thinking a lot about brain injury lately. I guess that’s kind of expected but I have also been trying to use the words to try to explain how my brain is different post injury.
The major part of the damage to my brain was the temporal lobe, and to a lesser extent the hippocampus or parts of my limbic systems. These two parts of the brain are essential in consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory. It also helps “organize” the information for retrieval.
Now I have to be careful here for a couple of reasons. One is that this is a gross understatement of how these parts of the brain work. So if you were going to take a Psychology test past Basic Psych 101 you would need a lot more detail than that. The other reason I need to be careful is if you don’t have any understanding of brain function it can seem really confusing.
There is another part of this equation that needs to be noted. Memory as a whole is a very generic term. There is muscle memory. You don’t think about how to move your tongue when you talk. You just talk. There is visual memory: when watching TV you don’t think to yourself “well look at that box with edges on it and cords coming out the back, and all those little pixels individually coming together to make an interesting shape” every time the image changes. That would overload your brain. Same way you don’t notice every single thing in your field of vision as you read this. Now that you read that you might likely notice more than just your computer. Perhaps you see the keypad, the table, the mouse and your hands and some things in the background and now you notice the wall and the floor. If you notice all these things at the same time, all the time you would over load your brain. What we do is “chunk” things.
Our long-term memory is huge. It’s really big. It’s so big and so vast that if you were to try to filter through all the information in your brain in the instant that you hear your alarm sound in the morning, just to find out how to turn it off, it would take you years to turn that alarm off. So your brain “retrieves” all the information about the location of the alarm, your approximation of what time it is, how much sleep you got, how much more sleep you need, how long it will take it you to get out the door if you buy your coffee on the way instead of making it, and skip the bus to just drive, in a fraction of a second. This is retrieval. It is amazing.
So we have input of information coming in. The alarm is going off and the sound comes through are auditory inputs. It gets filtered through different parts of the brain and the brain figures all that other stuff out and it knows where the snooze button is in the dark and tells your hand to hit it, and you fall back to sleep.
If just one of the steps along the way of that path doesn’t work, you don’t work.
While I often explain the results of my brain damage as “short-term memory loss” this is a little incorrect. You see stuff get’s into my library; however, it doesn’t always get put in the right spot. The bigger challenge for me is retention and chunking. I see a book but I might register it as tea. So I put it in the tea file. Then when I want to retrieve the book, I can’t find it. I sit there with tea.
Now the interesting thing about brains is how our long-term memory works in this carefully organized library. I was able to create a vast library of information before my injury. So I have a tea shelf, and I have a bookshelf. If a new experience happens to me, like meeting a new person, I don’t have to remember to speak English to them, I don’t have to remember they are a person and not a dog. My memory can “retrieve” a “chunk” of something similar. Where I have some of my biggest issues are when things get lost in translation in the retrieval. Think of it this way. How many people have had their parents, or how many parents have ever called their kid, or you, by one of your sibling’s names? Or worse have you ever said the wrong name in an intimate moment with a partner?
This is because we “chunk” information. In your library of information you “file” like things together. It’s a vast network often called the semantic network. Sometimes the network “goofs”. In my case my network is broken.
So if I can “chunk” a new event to some information that I put in my “network” at a previous time I have a better chance of being able to filter, and retrieve it. However if it’s a completely new element that I have never experienced, and I have nothing similar in the “library” to call on to give it a folder I will not be able to move it from short-term memory, to long-term memory, and retrieve it.
So this makes new events that I have never experienced before very challenging to retain.
So when I go to type my blog post for the day. I have to 1) filter all the data that occurred: all the smells, all the tree’s, all the Tim Horton’s cups, all senses data for the whole day don’t “filter” like yours do. They all come in at the same rate. So a blog post like this takes me several hours, especially when I am not having Mandy “prompt” me for things like spelling or specific events of the day. I do use spell check; however I have difficulty with homophones like to, too, or two. So my word choice get’s a little funky.
Now this is specific to my brain injury. Because of the unique nature of brain injury, the caretakers and close relatives of those with injury are able to know an insight into the dialogue and expressions of the person with a brain injury. And while they are not speaking for them, they are aiding them in being able to express the events they would not always normally be able to express.
You may have noticed there is a difference in my recent blog posts because Mandy has been here and she aids in my retrieval. With her here recently she has been helping me with my blog posts. She acts as my editor. She has helped make them more visual and helped me with my clarity, but she has not been writing them for me. She observes me during my run, takes notice of my reactions and discuses the day’s events with me. Due to the intimate nature of our relationship Mandy knows what I take notice of and often prompts my memory of what I wanted to include. My thoughts and feelings are still being shared. I just wanted to clarify that.
Sorry there are no photos today, we are having power issues and I cannot upload my photos. I will also get some pictures from Melissa’s camera and upload those when I have them.
Running to Parliament
We then drove back to where we stopped and I got to meet up with the Brain Injury Association of Ottawa. Some of their members ran with me to Parliament Hill where we were greeted by Yasir Naqvi MPP of Ottawa Centre, and Royal Gatineau the MPP of Orleans (where we were yesterday) joined us a little later on. 
