“I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings. Coming down is the hardest thing.”
Tom Petty
Three months ago, my son Kyle and I were hiking on a steep slick-rock pour-off. We were trying to catch
some little frogs and return them to the muddy pond on the bottom of the
slick-rock. He was bending over to grab one of these little frogs below
me and I was standing above
him with my boots gripping the steep slope. Not thinking about my surroundings, I leaned forward to look at the frog and ending up falling.
Now, slick-rock is a misnomer as it is not slick at all. It's actually a gritty, rough sandstone
that grips the bottom of one's shoes and is deceivingly easy to walk on. And a pour-off is where the rain
concentrates after a storm to flow downhill on rock, also known as a seasonal
waterfall. In wet years, the pool underneath this pour-off becomes filled with water, but this year it was just wet and quickly drying sand.
Kyle tried to grab my flailing arm, but he couldn’t catch me. Instinctively, I twisted around in mid-air, landed on my right butt cheek and hit the back of my head on the surprisingly hard ground. I probably fell about six feet.
My glasses flung off, but they weren’t broken or anything. Kyle called out to my husband Scott, who was waiting for us nearby. By the time Scott reached me, I was sitting on a rock with an aching head and feeling dizzy. I don't remember getting up from the ground and walking to the rock. Both Scott and Kyle agreed that I should go to the hospital and helped me walk back to the car. After stopping by the house to change, Scott drove me to the emergency room.
A CT scan showed a crack in my skull on the top of my head, although I have no idea how I hit it there, and two small brain bleeds in the subarachnoid and subdural layers of tissue between my skull and my brain. (I'd never heard of these layers before and had to look them up later). The doctors diagnosed me with a concussion and kept me in the hospital overnight to make sure the bleeding had stopped. Although they woke me up every hour to make sure my pupils were equal, I knew where I was, I could focus on how many fingers they were holding up, and I was grateful to be there.
I had another CT scan the next morning that showed the bleeding had in fact stopped so they let me go home. That’s when I discovered I had a very sore and swollen right butt cheek, which developed into a large salad bowl-sized hematoma (deep bruise) that is still swollen and bruised two months later, but is not sore anymore—thank goodness. The top of my head throbs and I still have a lump on the back of my head.
I hadn’t thought about concussions much before this happened to me, but now I’m fairly well versed. Basically, concussions happen when your brain slams against your skull and gets injured. Because my brain went forward when I hit the back of my head and then back, they call it a contre-coup brain injury. So far, I’ve had most of the symptoms of a moderate concussion: fatigue, dizziness, headaches, ocular migraines (the fun part of migraines—aura but no headache), light and noise sensitivity, over-stimulation which causes panic attacks and, worst of all, a loss of my sense of smell. That means I can’t taste anything except what the taste buds on my tongue detect: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, the savory taste of cooked meat and vegetables.
Before I lost my sense of smell, I didn't understand the difference between taste and flavor. Think of when you last had a head cold and couldn't breath through your nose. You couldn't taste your food very well because you couldn't smell what you were eating. However, you could still pick out some flavors because the chewed up food in your mouth also passes by your olfactory nerves a second time when you breathe in. The molecules coming from the outside of your body tell you what you are going to eat via your nasal cavity. The molecules coming from inside your mouth give you the ability to distinguish between flavors. Taste buds plus aroma from both your nose and mouth equals flavor.
If you have damaged your olfactory nerves, you can't detect flavor and have to enjoy foods by how they feel in your mouth (mouthfeel), what your taste buds can detect, and how you feel after you eat. I hope I get my sense of smell back, but I have a feeling it has been damaged beyond repair.
Here is a good link if you want to learn more about the sense of smell: https://www.physio-pedia.com/Olfactory_Nerve
Or if you prefer just looking at a diagram, here is the photo that comes with the above article:
What you can't tell from the photo above is how thin the bony barrier (called the cribriform plate) is between the brain and the olfactory nerves in
my nose that detect smell molecules. Olfactory nerves terminate in the olfactory bulb, which transmits the detected smell molecules
to the brain. Since the olfactory nerves dangle down from the top of the nasal cavity, they are
easily damaged if a person suffers a traumatic brain injury (TBI) such as mine. When the
brain slams against the nerves, it can shear them off or severely damage them. Although olfactory nerves have the ability to grow back, there is no telling if mine are too damaged to grow back. Meanwhile, I’m sniffing everything I can find: essential oils, spices, plants, the air after it rains, etc. and hoping the repeated scent onslaught will bring my sense of smell back. But so far no luck.
