*sign made at the sign generator site on the web*
After my car accident, I spent almost two months sleeping twenty hours a day, drinking a lot of coffee when I was awake, argueing with some bitch from the office at Running Sores over the telephone about forms she wanted me to fill out and which I could not make any sense of [sample question: What could you have done to avoid the accident? answer: Kill the bastard who decided he could smoke one joint before driving my car into a house. The lawyer suggested that I could please send the forms to him to fill out from then on], telling my 86 year old mother-in-law some rather filthy vile jokes-- none of which regrettably I remember now-- and cursing my head off.
I am not suggesting that pre-tbi my mouth was pure as the driven snow. It wasn't and neither was I. Post-tbi though, my cursing accelerated into a frenzy. I became total talking trash. Hubby would cringe every time I opened my mouth in public. Inserting the word "fuck" and variants at random-- several times in each sentence-- did not do a whole lot for my image or relationships with any medical personnel. It didn't do anything to endear me to the public around me either during the four hours or so that I was awake every day.
As a child, I didn't curse very much at all. I didn't talk much either. I was a quiet child. I came into my own with language as a teen. One time, my friend Peggy and I were walking the streets of Newark, New Jersey when some guys in a car made a rather crude suggestion to us. I screamed out the viliest epitath of my vocabulary at that time. "FUCK OFF!" The guys left real fast.
Peggy decided that perhaps I would enjoy seeing the play Grease after all. I did. At the show, several nuns in front of us went hysterical with laughter when one actor used the words "fucking A!"
My fuck memories pale in comparison to my vocabulary for the first two months after my tbi. Finally, one physical therapist told me that I could learn to control the cursing. Cursing is a universal problem for the recent brain-injured. I had read that somewhere but no one ever suggested that it could be self-remediated. I immediately set out on a course of language modification. That involved thinking long enough and hard enough for different words to show up in my damaged brain. [I have a form of mild expressive aphasia, though no one had told me that at the time]. I found that endeavoring not to curse was far easier than picking and choosing which social situations called for a mild showing of the four lettered words I know.
After about a year and a half of almost no cursing, I became healed enough to consciously follow simple rules. Eileen or Nancy = yes. Family dinners = no. Court appearances = no [with the attorney quietly cueing in the judge that my self-regulation was perilous at best under stress]. Sandi = yes. Most doctors and hospitals = no. While driving = yes. While driving with husband as passenger = yes with a cavaet: Be prepared for him to claim that I had become the potty-mouthed driver.
~grumbly sapphoq
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