Six-Month Brain Damage Anniversary! (Or: “Dabid’s State of Mind “)

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Today is the official six-month anniversary of when I had my blinding quadruple stroke, so I wanted to use today’s entry to reflect on how my life has changed since that event and commemorate what my present state of mind is.

To say that these six months have been the most difficult of my life would be an understatement of hyperbolic proportions. Suddenly becoming mostly blind at this point in my life is beyond debilitating. It sort of goes without saying, but virtually everything you do from when you wake in the morning until you go to sleep at night is dependent upon your vision.

It’s next to impossible for me to put how broken my vision is into precise words, because even after half a year of talking to doctors and therapists, I still really don’t understand it myself.

What I do understand, though, is that even with all of the vision therapy and experimental research I’ve done over the last six months, I would still say things have only improved by 0%.

I’ve been rather dreading this six-month mark, since that’s the traditionally agreed-upon cutoff for when chance of recovery drops to zero. But my neuro-ophthalmologist already told me I had a 0% chance of recovery after two months, so I’m a bit numb to it by now. I’m doing everything that can be done, so I won’t have to live with the regret of thinking I could have done more, but that’s cold comfort when nothing is helping.

Playing video games and watching TV/movies are next to impossible, since the on-screen motion just processes in what remains of my brain as flashing blurs. I mostly just listen to stuff anymore (I even got a dreaded “Audible” account, which I admit is not as bad as I thought it would be).

Reading comics is a nightmare, as my brain cuts off half of whatever I’m looking at. Whether I focus on a single panel or a whole page, half of whatever I’m trying to see blurs away. I’m getting better at puzzling out what I’m seeing, but image processing is still an immense challenge overall.

Just web browsing and typing on my phone is an ordeal, but with hundreds of hours spent doing it since my accident, I’ve gotten a bit better at typing without seeing half the keyboard and fixing errors as I make them so that the mistakes aren’t lost forever as my eyes move on to the next word.

Collecting is still a driving focus of my life, but a large amount of the joy of getting a new toy is definitely lost when you can barely see it at best and can’t see it at all if your eyes move away slightly. I’ve started to include additional context and personal anecdotes in my reviews and unboxing videos to make up for some of the discussion of the actual collectibles that’s lost to me not being able to see them.

You might think I would be buying less since I can’t independently drive to stores anymore, but I’m getting really good at making copious amounts of impulse buys online instead.

I haven’t thought too much about going anywhere or visiting anyone, because even if I could get somewhere else, what’s really the point of traveling to something or someone I can’t see anyway?

I think it’s an ironic and suitable Hell for me that after living most of my life distancing myself from others (consciously or otherwise), I end up being permanently distanced from living in this world and having normal relationships with others by an abrupt life-changing injury.

One of the hardest things has been coping with the fact that I look fine to friends and family from the outside (probably partially due to my propensity to overachieve through effort and force of will), but from my point of view the world is a nightmare kaleidoscope it’s a battle just to navigate through every day. “You don’t seem to be limited at all!” What a joke.

It’s still really hard for me to comprehend that this is forever—that I won’t wake up someday and be able to see the world around me and be able to interact with it as I did for the first 39 years of my life. I’ll never finish Cuphead, watch all those iconic normie shows and movies I wanted to experience, play Smash Bros. competitively or read all those comics Omnibuses I’ve accumulated and be able to really comprehend what I’m seeing.

If all the things I love aren’t truly accessible to me anymore in a manner that allows me to appreciate them, I have to wonder a little bit about what meaning there is in living on in this condition.

I haven’t given up, though. A wise ninja once told me that it’s all over once I give up on myself, so I need to keep going nonetheless.

I still have over 5 months left before the deadline I set for myself to finish this book, and I know in it’s completed form it will somehow be meaningful to someone and help them in their journey. I know it.

Wrestling (or: “Dabid’s Unlikely Favorite Sport”)

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If anyone asked me what happened in the world or in my life in 1992, I would stare at them blankly and silently. But if asked about Wrestlemania XIII from that same year, I could rapidly rattle off the full card, results, and the storylines/circumstances building up to each match.

Professional wrestling came onto my radar in early 1992 in a predictably toy-driven fashion. The Hasbro WWF line of 4” action figures was hitting its stride and starting to have more and more shelf space devoted to it in stores, and memorable characters like morbidly-obese Earthquake and the crown-wearing “Macho King” Randy Savage quickly drew my eye and a few of my dollars. Most of Hasbro’s figures featured some sort of spring-loaded punch or throw “signature move” action feature (which arbitrarily sometimes were or were not actual moves the superstars performed in real life).

Not knowing exactly how to properly play with these action figures since I wasn’t an existing wrestling fan, I started to bring home 99 cent VHS rentals of past WWF Pay-Per-View events to learn the histories and backstories of these colorful characters appearing on toy store shelves. One or two VHS rentals multiplied into dozens, and soon I’d consumed all of the locally available WWF videotapes—some multiple times!

Although I have a love of–and knack for–memorizing stats and numbers, I’ve never been at all able to get into any kind of “traditional” sports (with one exception as an adult that I’ll talk about later). “Real” sports just didn’t have enough of a narrative for me to sink my teeth into. I needed athletes who were larger than life, with a wide spectrum of personalities, backstories and alignments! As I delved into professional wrestling fandom, I discovered that it delivered all these and more, adding an overlay of good vs. evil onto a competitive athletics backdrop.

Before I knew it, I had memorized the stats and histories of every even somewhat notable wrestler in the WWF, and then turned my sights to the “lesser” major wrestling promotion at the time, WCW. (I knew it was a “ lesser” company since their action figures were non-poseable plastic chunks with many less characters produced, primarily being sold at discount stores near me instead of bigger toy retailers.)

There were far fewer easily-accessible video tapes of WCW around, so I had to learn about this company’s competitors by reading magazines at the grocery store and paying close attention to when WCW Saturday Night aired on TV each week.

Historically, people have been surprised if not openly disgusted when they discover that I’m a pro wrestling fan. Prior to wrestling briefly being “cool” in the late 90s, it was vocally regarded by many in my peer group as being a sort of “fake”, cartoony carnival sideshow. Once it became edgy and trendy during the “Attitude Era”, it temporarily became more socially acceptable to be a wrestling fan. But not for me, as my peers couldn’t reconcile that my Lawful Good, rule-abiding character could enjoy shows filled with copious swearing, raunchy themes and sometimes extreme violence.

On a side note, I cannot fathom why wrestling haters gleefully declare that “wrestling is fake!” with such frequency, thinking that such an argument should automatically invalidate others’ fandom.

I’ve never heard anyone say “Comic books are fake!” or “Game of Thrones is fake!” In attempts to suck the joy out of fans of those stories, and it’s a bit baffling to me why wrestling seems to be such an almost universally natural target for bullies.

Art is art, and wrestling is an art form that trained athletes participate in. Even if individual wrestling matches, shows and TV segments are oftentimes tawdry and poorly-conceived, as a whole, wrestling is still in the genre of arts and entertainment.

One goal I had in my life was to see someone win a wrestling world championship in-person. I’ve attended a fair number of wrestling PPVs with my wife and/or best friend, but I always came up short.

I was actually at the inaugural New Year’s Revolution PPV in Albany In 2006 where Edge cashed in the first-ever Money in the Bank briefcase to win the world championship from a weakened John who had just survived a grueling Elimination Chamber main event six-way match, but we left during the main event in an effort to beat the crowds out (and not anticipating the then-unprecedented cash-in). I was bitter about missing that historic event for a long time. (At least I got to watch the legendary “Live Sex Celebration” for Edge on TV the next night.)

Eventually, I did see a world championship win in June 2014, when my best friend and I watched John Cena ascend to the top of a ladder to win the WWE Title in Boston.

John Cena is easily one of the greats of all-time in my book, and this would be his 15th and penultimate world title reign. He would lose the WE World Heavyweight championship soon after at Summerslam 2014. In one of the most memorable matches I’ve ever seen in my life, Cena was absolutely destroyed by Brock Lesnar, eating 16 duplexes after being near-killed by an F-5 in the first 30 seconds. To me, this is the night that John Cena made Brock Lesnar’s career.

Around this time, Cena became a full part-timer and WWE Owner Vince McMahon became utterly obsessed with making a guy named Roman Reigns the next big mega-star on the same level as Cena, The Rock, Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin. (Reigns torpedoed the company for years being booed out of arena after arena as an insufferable “good guy”, but eventually reached his potential once a global pandemic allowed him to develop his skillls and character in empty arenas without a crowd).

Having achieved my goal of seeing a world championship victory already and having a burning hatred for Roman Reigns from 2015-2020, I lost a lot of my zeal for the company and didn’t attend a live show for over half a decade after TLC 2015 in Boston.

I would eventually see one more Pay-Per-View live in Las Vegas in 2021 right before my stroke quadrilogy, but that’s a story for another entry.

Summer DAYS (or: “Comic Books, Soap Operas & Dabid’s Faux-Italian Grandmother)

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My parents tried sending me to a children’s’ day camp or some such during the summer when I was a younger pre-teen, but it didn’t work out so well. I didn’t play or socialize well with other children, and being forced to participate in physical games and activities like “dodgeball” and “swimming” with other kids for hours every day was something akin to Hell for me. Trying to be forced to imbibe something called “Bug Juice” (I think a euphemism for Gatorade) made me cry.

This experiment was mercifully short, but my parents didn’t want me around the house for months when school was out of session, so I was instead shipped off to spend my summer days with my elderly grandmother in her subsidized senior living apartment.

Her apartment complex, Franciscan Village, was built inside a historic Franciscan Monastery, so everything was rather brown and tan and dull. Quiet, no other youngsters around, TV, nobody to bother me but an 80-something year-old woman who slept most of the day—yep, this was the life.

My grandmother—Mama Ricco, as she generally referred to herself in the third person (she began all phone calls the same way every time, whether calling someone or answering: “This is Mama Ricco…”)—spoke with a pronounced Italian accent and would frequently go off on tangents about her youthful days in Italy. It wasn’t until I was almost an adult that I found out she had, in truth, never even been to Italy or outside the United States at all and that her thick accent was entirely fabricated. She was an eccentric, hefty old lady and I loved her dearly.

Days passed leisurely with Mama Ricco, as she had a walker and wasn’t especially mobile, moving at a speed of about a quarter mile per hour. She didn’t drive and never left the apartment complex unless it was for a medical appointment or family event. Occasionally I’d escort her over to the complex’s chapel for prayer, but that happened more and more seldom as time passed.

With little other stimulation and no social trivialities to distract me, it’s during my years of summers with Mama Ricco that two of my most enduring lifelong interests developed.

The first was my initial exposure to one of Mama Ricco’s “stories”, a soap opera titled “Days of our Lives”. Mama Ricco preferred the show after DAYS (as I learned to abbreviate it, in the manner it was truncated by soap fans), “Another World”. I thought that “AW” was a little bland and boring, and never really got into it.

DAYS, however, I have no shame in admitting I watched literally thousands of hours of throughout my childhood, teenage years, college years and into adulthood. When I had to be at school during the show, I taped it on VHS tapes I set recording before leaving in the morning. I consumed soap opera books and weekly magazines to catch up on the decades of history that were before my time.

Who killed who and why, who was related to who, who had a checkered past as a drug dealer or had been possessed By the devil, who had banged their spouse’s Mom—I knew it all and was mesmerized by this no-doubt-realistic portrayal of what the world outside my own antisocial existence was really like.

I even did a presentation in high school discussing the soap opera, and it turned out to be a rare commonality I could have conversations about with other students who were fans (though I suspect not to the same obsessive extent as myself).

The other interest that developed during the era spent at Mama Ricco’s abode was a fateful one that would someday blossom into the work I’m most famous for: comic books.

The stars aligned and I was in the right place at the right time to have the perfect set of circumstances to be exposed to mainstream superhero history as it happened. The greatest decade of comic book-based cartoons was about to start (including X-Men, WildCATS, Batman: The Animated Series and more) and I was spending my days at an apartment complex a less than five minute walk from what would become one of the most beloved comic stores in existence, the then-recently-opened Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop.

I have a lot more memories of being in that comic book shop than I do most other things from growing up, but I won’t drag this entry out talking about how I eternally regret passing on the Bowen Designs Deadpool mini-bust I saw in the shop for $30 (which ultimately led to my obsession with statues and mini-busts).

I would do everything in my power to scrounge up some spare change each day so that I could spend a half hour or so raiding the back issue bins for bargain comics that would expand my knowledge in these pre-Wikipedia times. It was here at Carol & John’s that I was first exposed to and began to become well-versed in the X-Men, Spider-Man, New Mutants, Fantastic Four, New Warriors, Thor and many more comic book icons that would eventually take the mainstream world by storm.

It was a perfect scenario to grow an intense specialized interest in, as I could watch the cartoons on TV and then go buy back-stocked comics to feed my growing need to know more and more about the Marvel characters whose toys on shelves were fueling my inner fire.

Mama Ricco passed away in the summer of 2004, but I didn’t attend her funeral since I avoid the rest of my biological relatives for any reason. Even so, I think it’s apropos that I was attending my first-ever comic book convention during Mama Ricco’s funeral, as the comic book expertise developed during my tenure as her sorta-ward would go on to be a core component of my life and future.

Erased (Or: “Dabid’s Backup)

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I don’t really have any memories from the day of my strokes. It’s weird knowing that you were awake… conscious… doing stuff and having conversations… maybe having existential epiphanies about life and existence… but all memory of those things has been burned away forever.

I say “burned away” because something I do have clear memories of is a crazed hallucination I had on the first or second night I was off life support in the ICU. In my “dream”, I was sitting in a room—in my mind—and seeing a film strip of memories in front of me on fire, burning to ash. If you’ve ever seen the anime “Erased”, it’s like the opening to that, but with fire.

(In “Erased”—which should be called “The Town Where Only I Don’t Exist” in the English version, but isn’t, because of chicanery—the main character is able to time travel his adult consciousness into his younger self in order to relive and change past events in his life. the opening shows his young and adult selves sitting in an otherwise empty theater. )

After my memory strip burned up, I was floating in a void, sure that it was the end for me. Somehow, I managed to burst out from the ocean of unconsciousness, a la Naruto in the “Diver” opening to Naruto Shippuden. I was utterly petrified and probably at my maximal blindness, but I can confidently pinpoint that moment as the moment I decided I definitely wanted to—and was going to—live.

My wife and best friend, Dave, were there when I burst out of life-death, and I remember telling my wife not to worry because Dave could just back up my consciousness and install it into a new clone body if anything went bad. Dave assured me he did not have that technology, but my brain was totally scrambled and I was unconvinced that the basis for Jonathan Hickman’s “X-Men: House of X/Powers of X” was fictional.

Central to the foundation of HoX/PoX is the concept that Charles Xavier stores backups of the minds of every mutant so that mutants never die permanently—but when resurrected, they’re missing any memories from between their death and most recent backup. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the implications of that.

Any answers I might have arrived at the day of my strokes, regarding life, the universe, or my part in either, were burned away forever (along with who knows how many billion other memories and brain cells). But if large chunks of me were utterly erased permanently, just like that, was I still really the same “me” at all? I wonder.

For those who haven’t heard me gush about it, I consider House of X/Powers of X to be the greatest and most transcendent comic book narrative of our time. It redefined and reframed decades of comic book history in a way I had never seen before and don’t expect to see again.

I tried explaining HoX/PoX to my neurology team when they came in to evaluate me—including my concern that I’d already died and been resurrected to a backup body—but they also insisted that they didn’t have that technology.

Jonathan Hickman was definitely ahead of his time.

spider-Man No More! (Or: “Dabid Quits a Job)

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Around the start of April in 2021, I got up the guts to ask to leave my job (which I have not yet talked about in this blog, but may or may not circle back to) as a marketing and communications executive in the collectibles industry. I hadn’t been doing well for months at that point, and It turned out that making the decision to resign was the correct choice for me.

I felt an extreme amount of pressure and responsibility on my shoulders in that job (almost certainly overvaluing myself, but whatever),and it ended up taking an immense toll on me physically and psychologically. You should never work for an employer whose well-being you set above your own, but that’s what I chose to do for too long, and by the end, I was seriously coming undone.

A big part of working in marketing is, well… marketing, which can be defined as the “action or business of promoting and selling products or services”. When one is zealously trying to promote or sell something, they oftentimes choose to present a rather lopsided perspective of their item in order to convince consumers to purchase it.

As an independent toy reporter, I had been blessed for years with the privilege of complete autonomy and being able to present a full analysis of collectibles—both the good and the bad—without being beholden to anyone. But being a company man, I suddenly had a responsibility to only give collectors partial viewpoints of items—something that contradicted my principle of 100% honesty.

I also had to learn to keep a multitude of secrets from my friends and fellow fans, violating my predilection for complete transparency in interacting with others and making me nervous about slipping up when talking to some of my closest friends . I might be spoiled, but staying true to my values is a priority in my life. Having to work around them for a job was tough for a brat like me.

Additionally, I frequently have enormous difficulties interpreting what others are saying or feeling or asking for, so I was constantly terrified I’d accidentally give an unsuitable response to one of the hundreds of social media comments I’d be moderating each day and the company would suffer for my mistake. I spent quite a few sleepless nights during that year and a half worrying about haplessly bringing shame to my employer. Those nights compounded and I felt more and more drained and sleep-deprived.

And I was being dramatically underpaid for the monumental amount of work I was doing and the damage I was doing to myself to do so, which didn’t help matters. (I also got tired of being called a “retard” by randos on the Internet who saw me in my company videos, which didn’t exactly encourage me to keep doing my best for them to keep their interest in collecting fun and interesting.)

My wife absolutely abhorred that I ever took such a high-demand, low-return job in the first place, and it was a frequent point of contention between us during my year and a half working in the industry. She loathed my devotion to the company and was delighted when I decided to give it up, so it was nice to have her full support on abandoning my job while in the midst of a pandemic and going back to my career as an independent reporter with limited and uncertain monthly income.

I gave about three months notice that I was quitting so that my boss would have adequate time to find a suitable replacement for me who could handle all my duties without disrupting the status quo, but it ended up being irrelevant—no one was actually hired to replace me at all. Nothing to make a guy feel superfluouslike his job being eliminated basically entirely. It actually made my decision to leave a easier for me, though—if my duties could be dissipated so easily, clearly I wasn’t as necessary as I feared.

While winding. down my preparations to leave my position, I spent many hours writing an elaborate step-by-step document detailing precisely how to perform all of my duties—but it was also a waste, as most of those tasks weren’t taken up by anyone else anyway and were never performed again.

And so, on August 1st 2021, I left my proverbial Spider-Man mask in a random alleyway trash can and retired from the corporate business world forever, beginning serious brainstorming for this book/blog, which I intended to be the capstone great work of my life. Little did I realize at the time that I might be starting such a chronicle too late…

Grawlixes (or: “Dabid’s Entry About Swear Words ”)

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One of my biggest hang-ups in life that I’ve never been able to get past pertains to swearing/swear words.

Throughout my younger days, my father used to angrily swear at me, my mother, and a plethora of absent people he perceived as having wronged him (whether they were people he actually knew or not) during his frequent, explosive outbursts. That’s my earliest recollection of such language.

I don’t think I had any comprehension of what “obscene” words actually were or meant as a pre-teen, but nonetheless I am certain I never swore in front of my parents (or later, my wife’s parents) in my life. I don’t know if I would have been scolded or not as a kid for cursing, but anything that might get me abandoned in the woods wasn’t worth trying. And something intrinsically also prohibited me from doing so.

In fact, I don’t think I ever said a profanity at all in my life until I was in high school, and I didn’t start to become genuinely comfortable using such scandalous vocabulary in private conversations even with my closest friends until I was an adult. 

I see the world in a very polarized manner of absolutes (ie right and wrong). Since there were certain words not permitted within school that I saw other children being reprimanded for using, I quickly internalized that such words were clearly “bad” and I resolved not to ever use them (as I didn’t want to be “bad” as well).

In my middle school Home Ec class (maybe the course I performed worst at during my entire childhood—I hate any kind of craftwork to this day), I can remember myself and a classmate ratting out another student for swearing in the classroom in a conversation with someone. The elderly teacher called us up and asked us to whisper in her ear what he had said. My classmate was delighted to comply, but I staunchly refused. I was shocked that the teacher would ask me to commit the very rulebreaking offense that another student was about to be punished for. This sort of subjectivity just did not make sense to me as being logical (then or now).

It even bothered me as a kid when characters in pro wrestling, comics or cartoons would swear, even in the form of grawlixes (the word for a string of typographic symbols used in place of obscenities—yes, there’s a real word for those, believe it or not). The idea that a hero like Spider-Man could occasionally spout punishable words like “hell” and “damn” was stunning to my young self.

This sort of inflexibility is a recurring theme of my life, and not using the favorite words of every other kid in my school really made me stick out even further (although I’ve always stood out for being different regardless of my choices of diction).

At one of the year-end awards ceremonies in middle school, I won the “Citizenship” award. My classmates said they’d voted for me over more notable or popular students because they’d never heard me swear. I now realize I should have felt alienated by this, but at the time I was proud that it was reinforcing and validating my Lawful Good alignment, which became a deeper-set part of my identity. Ultimately, I think this just further “Other”-ed me and made others uncomfortable around me. But unfortunately, I’m only realizing that now, decades later. 

Even so, despite my “do-gooder” ways, I was still a teenager myself and secretly admired the freedom and rebelliousness of my classmates for their perceived wicked ways of speaking. 

I wanted to rebel against myself and my “pure and good” manner of speaking badly, but it proved to be difficult for a number of reasons. 

First, I didn’t like breaking the rules (I still don’t) and didn’t want to get into trouble. I felt that a lot of my success in school was dependent on my teachers liking me, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that by being a “troublemaker”. 

Secondly, my personal experience with cuss words at home was primarily my parents hatefully spewing them at me or each other. I hated my parents—and the possibility that I could use language in hurtful or inflammatory ways like them really troubled me. 

And thirdly (and most impassably), after I had shamefully learned to say a few mild cusses like “damn” or “ass” to myself independently during high school, on the rare occasions that I got up enough willpower to utter such a word in front of a classmate, they  generally reacted either with shock or by teasingly chastising me for being “corrupted “. 

This loudly set off my Lawful Good sensibilities and made me feel like I was doing something sinful, so I mostly gave up on the idea of using the vernacular of everyone else my age until I got to college and was surrounded by people without existing conceptions about me.

I really did try hard to imitate cursing like my classmates in college, but my informal training in this discipline went astray.

Most of my cursing “skills” developed over the course of playing hundreds of hours of Super Smash Bros. 64 with my best friend in our dorm room, where I picked up on what words were “appropriate” to use in battle and under what circumstances. It never “felt” right, though—it’s just not a thing that comes naturally to me, and it always sounds rather fake and hollow as a result.

I know all the cuss words and think they’re super cool and can say them (with some effort), but I feel like I’m missing something inside of me everyone else has that makes using that vocabulary automatic and authentic for them. When I insert cuss words, it’s like going through the motions.

Being able to throw in swear words in conversations with friends and in my dopey unboxing videos is a big sort-of-win for me (such as it is), but I feel like I’m still lacking something intangibly human. I feel dishonest having to consciously think to purposely pepper expletives into my speech (and I detest feeling dishonest).

 I am intensely jealous of other people who can get angry and unconsciously release that pent-up frustration with a good, powerful swear that comes to them naturally and expresses a negative (“bad”) emotion.  

I’ve begun to sort of accept that I just don’t have that kind of power within me, though. Even after having a quadruple stroke, being tortured in the ICU for a week and a half and going mostly blind, I still can’t find it in myself to forcefully emit an emotion-filled, vociferous curse word to express my feelings at this outcome.

Dangit.

baby Switched! (Or: Dabid’s Dad)

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Since I went mostly blind and largely useless, I may have suggested to my wife a few times that she drive down to the woods and leave me there if I become too much of a burden. She asked where I came up with such an idea, which made me think about something I rarely spare any thoughts to: my parentage. Specifically, my dad.

I haven’t seen my dad in about a decade and a half now, and he’s been dead for half that time. So my memories from 15+ years ago (and before 4 strokes ago) are getting a little hazy. But while I was rolling around in bed all night pondering what enhancements to make to the deck of my Gloomhaven Savvas Elementalist, Avatar Drew I, I had some flashes of recollection. Since this is a book about my life and people may wonder about the genealogical background of someone they’re reading about, I suppose I might as well fill in a few blanks.

I remember my dad telling me about how there had been a newborn next to me in the nursery at the hospital—Zachariah—and that the hospital must have made a mistake and given my parents the wrong baby by mistake. If I didn’t shape up, he threatened, he’d take me to the orphanage and exchange me for Zachariah. (I think it must have been really hard on my dad having a son wired so completely differently from him who he didn’t understand at all. )

I remember my dad holding me down and not letting me go. 

I was instructed I had to behave as I was told or my dad would drive me down to the woods and leave me there. (And people wonder why I’ve spent my life so firmly entrenched in Lawful Good.)

My dad did manual labor as a carpenter as his profession, but he was always full of rage when he’d rant about how he was so much smarter than all his peers and would have been a huge success if everyone hadn’t dissuaded him from going to college. 

I recall my dad being gone until after midnight most nights of the week because he was out gambling. That was fine. I liked not having competition for the TV. 

I remember being shoved against the wall with my dad’s hand on my throat (picture Itachi choking Sasuke from Naruto episode 85–it’s funny that way). 

Though I’ve long since forgotten the exact words, I can still feel the intensity of my dad’s daily hate-filled diatribes, filled with screaming and swearing about anyone who wasn’t a straight white man with his belief system. He would have absolutely loved four of the last five years in America. 

I remember someone (I think a relative on my mom’s side who clearly could make a more informed judgment than me) telling me my father was a good man. 

I don’t believe I ever saw my dad kiss or even hug my mom in my entire life. He must have loved her, though. He didn’t take her down to the woods and abandon her or anything.

Hemianopsia (Or: “Dabid Goes Semi Blind”)

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When the doctor(s) in the ICU came to tell me about my vision loss, I didn’t really care. Part of that indifference was surely due to the plethora of drugs sedating me, but it’s also likely because I didn’t really care about anything at that time beyond no one else shoving tubes down my throat.

I would care a whole lot more about my vision (or lack thereof) in the months to follow.

While I’d had four ischemic strokes, the two larger ones that the doctors said they were worried about were in the parts of the brain controlling my vision and the left part of my body.
The official term doctors and therapists kept saying to me regarding my sight was “hononymous hemianopia”, which is basically a fancy way of saying that even though my eyes themselves are not damaged, my brain no longer processes input from the same half of both eyes (the left halves, in my case). It’s a condition that there is no scientifically-accepted treatment, medicine or surgery for and a wholly negative prognosis.

I’ve attached my actual vision field test results from November 2021 to this post. The black areas are the parts of my eyes that test as blind.

Dabid's Vision Field Test November 2021

This vision loss is infinitely more disabling than I expected at first, and it’s taken me over two months to even start to comprehend what’s happened to my vision and what it means. You might think I could just stick a badass eyepatch over my left eye like Carl Grimes to “block” my lost vision and be good to go, but it just doesn’t work that way. Because of the baffling way that human eyesight works, those left halves no longer functioning meant that I suddenly had complete loss of all of my peripheral vision on the left side and a huge, persistent blur added to my central vision (particularly the left side of the center, since central vision is made up of the good right half of my left eye and the blind left half of my right eye). There’s also dark shadows and dots and blocks that move around in my “working” visual field, which the opthamologist said is my brain trying to cope with the damage. This basically amounts to more than half of my whole vision field being completely fucked.

I thought maybe I could be double the badass and get a pair of half-eyepatches, but apparently that was a poorly-conceived notion.

It’s virtually impossible for me to describe what my post-strokes eyesight is like to someone not experiencing it. The best comparison I can make is to when you put on a cumbersome Halloween mask or helmet and realize you can only see out through limited eye holes in front. And then, take that restricted vision and imagine that the paparazzi runs up and uses dozens of high-powered flashes right in your face, so that the field of vision you do have unobscured is covered in moving, flashing spots of light that never go away.
Yeah, my new vision is like that—but worse and more complicated.

The large stroke to my occipital lobe was large enough that I have visual processing problems on top of the hemianopsia double vision, increased light sensitivity, contrast sensitivity and inability to track multiple objects with my eyes are some of the symptoms that have arisen from the visual processing damage.
There’s lots of crazy oddball stuff I’ve experienced as well. For the first several weeks I was awake, things I’ve seen thousands of times and can clearly picture in my mind’s eye looked very bizarre. The Pokémon sprites in Pokémon Go, for example, looked ultra angular as if they were made out of Minecraft blocks for weeks.

In addition, a layer of pixelation-like static (sometimes called “visual snow”) covers up the remaining usual field I do have. It makes it extremely difficult to process what is in front of me, particularly drawings or photos. Watching TV is also challenging for anything beyond slow-moving sitcoms and talking heads shows. Reading comics is an ordeal since my brain cuts off the leftmost words in bubbles and I have to puzzle out what’s happening in the artwork based on colors, shapes and contextual clues.

Perhaps most distressing is my inability to play video games where things or characters move around. My once-formidable Super Smash Bros skills have devolved to the point where Level 1 CPUs thrash me severely because my brain can’t keep up at all and the characters literally blink out of existence for me while I repeatedly and unwittingly self-destruct. I am a ruined shell of my former gaming self.

I have never attempted to drive since my strokes, since my license would be taken away even if I didn’t die (which I surely would).

Just typing up simple blog entries like this one is an arduous, tiring challenge that uses every iota of my willpower since the left half of my phone screen is blurred over no matter how I be position my phone, white space between lines and words is difficult to perceive, and I hit the wrong letters on the keyboard constantly since even the keys that aren’t covered in shadows split and move around in my pixelated, doubled vision.

The Harvard-graduated neuro-ophthalmologist I saw a few weeks ago said it was not a positive sign that my vision hadn’t improved in the two months since the strokes, and I had a roughly 0% chance of recovery, putting a number to and reinforcing what every previous doctor, nurse and therapist had told me. And so, I’ve been seeking out questionable alternative treatments and more opinions.

Luckily, I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Naruto and spent dozens of times that amount thinking about it. I also endured at least three years of pure garbage Naruto filler episodes. I don’t give up.

Spilled Pepsi (or: “Dabid Almost Dies II)

Penguin Dome! Posted on by

At some point another Doctor Mask and Light told me that I was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and had had multiple strokes (whatever ”strokes” were). I couldn’t talk because my teeth were biting down into something hard that was crowbarring my mouth open . I don’t have solid memories of this period, as I’d later find out I was heavily drugged up on somethings called fentanyl and propofol.

More Doctor Masks and Lights made me squeeze their hands, give thumbs up and try to lift my arms and wiggle my toes (I could do none of the above on my left side). But mostly, I was just oblivious to the world around me during this time. Thank God.

I heard voices in the room assert that”The wife was insistent that he not be woken up unless she was here”.

Clearly they botched that, since I was awake to hear their discussion.

I was also cognizant of something foreign in my throat that I didn’t like and set to work trying to rip it out. The Doctor Masks must not have liked that, because I went totally unconscious again at that point and they affixed some sort of glove to my hand to inhibit my ability to pull out the object running down my throat.

On September 18th 2021, my wife raced home from work early to find me passed out and unresponsive on the couch. She knew something was wrong when I didn’t immediately respond to her text messages hours beforehand about ordering something online (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s spending money online)and continued to not respond throughout the afternoon .

After finding me, my wife quickly called the paramedics, who burst into our house a few minutes later and took me away in an ambulance (there’s an experience I can scratch off my scorecard—booyah) to a nearby Emergency Room. I’m told that while the paramedics were trying to revive me and set me up on the stretcher, they knocked over and spilled my untouched(but uncapped) daily 20 oz. Pepsi that was on an adjacent table. What a waste.

spiral (or: “Dabid Almost Dies I”)

Penguin Dome! Posted on by

I think that I was trapped in a spiral,

 

plummeting downward for a long time,

 

but I couldn’t see it and didn’t realize I was falling at all.

 

Right up until I crashed  into the bottom.  
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

>< >< >< >< > < >< >< >< >< ><

 

I awoke in what I believed to be an unlit, dark room with someone wearing a doctor’s mask shining a light in my face. 

I could hear a couple people talking in the room with me:  “…[BLAH BLAH] Too late to reverse the brain damage…

And I thought to myself, “Uh-oh. That’s not good.”