Flex Your Head
On the 20th anniversary of a traumatic brain injury, I look back with gratitude for the caretakers and the community that brought me back to life.
I.
After 20 years, I still can’t remember anything about the worst day of my life. I’ve pieced the story together from accident reports, witness statements, hospital records, and depositions from the subsequent lawsuit, so technically, I know what happened. Still, nothing about this story comes from direct memory.
According to the hospital invoice, it happened on the morning of Saturday, November 1, 2003. According to the calendar I kept, I had just moved from a small apartment in the Temescal area of Oakland to a literal dream home in West Oakland the day before, and the only thing I had to do that day was pick up the bike I’d left chained in front of my old place. According to context clues, it was a pleasant day out, so I decided to throw some headphones on and walk over. According to police reports, I was literally across the street from my former apartment when the traffic light turned in my favor and I confidently stepped into the crosswalk, only steps away from my bike. At that moment, a commercial tow truck turned the corner of 52nd Street and Shattuck Avenue and did not stop. The driver later said in a deposition, “I didn’t see him.” At 9 a.m. In broad daylight. In the middle of a wide open crosswalk. That’s when he drove his truck into my body.
From what I can gather, it’s likely that I saw him coming and that I raised my arms in a defensive position. The brunt of the physical trauma was absorbed by my pelvis, which broke in two places, and my ribs, which were somehow only bruised. According to witnesses, I flew into the air after he hit me and landed several feet away—first on my wrist, which also broke, and then on my head, several times, where my brain shook inside of my skull. At that point, the magic of shock and adrenaline kicked in and I somehow rose to my feet, where—again, according to witnesses—I began cursing out the tow truck driver, with blood running down my face, until I finally collapsed, my head striking concrete for the last time.
Over the next three days, I laid unconscious while doctors tried to decide what to do with me. The broken bones were one thing, but I had also suffered from a traumatic brain injury that was complicated by cranial bleeding. As the doctor explained to me later, in words I won’t forget, if the blood were to have penetrated the protective tissues around my brain, the results would have been “instantly corrosive” and potentially fatal. Which is why, at one point, doctors considered drilling a hole into my skull to relieve the swelling and manually drain the blood. Thankfully, it didn’t get that far.
But that’s not how the story ends. As I personally came to understand it, traumatic brain injuries have wide-ranging consequences that span from mild to severe, imperceptible to clearly visible, short-term to lifelong. Over the next year, while also struggling to recover from physical injuries that left me unable to walk unassisted for at least six months, I began to experience how all-encompassing a brain injury can be: I suffered from a non-stop migraine headache that persisted for almost a year. The part of my brain that governs impulse control was affected to the point where my emotional state became highly erratic; I was breaking down in tears for no reason or blowing up in visceral anger at the drop of a dime. I had severe difficulty with short-term and visual memory which, combined with my lack of impulse control, turned into bouts of inconsolable frustration. I even completely lost my sense of smell, never to return.
In hindsight, I can say for sure that I did not feel like “myself” again for several years after the accident. In fact, I never went back to being exactly who I was before. To this day, when I mentally organize my life, there are only two eras: pre-brain injury and post-brain injury.
II.
One of the hardest things about recovering from a traumatic brain injury is the feeling that no one truly understands what you’re going through. If you’ve never experienced a TBI before, it’s difficult to explain what it feels like for your brain to physically struggle in order to complete a basic task. If you’ve never experienced a TBI before, there is no way that I can explain to you how your very sense of self becomes a material concern; all of the mystical or spiritual explanations of “who I am” quickly fell away when I experienced how a change in brain chemistry inexplicably caused a radical change in self-perception. These are not small revelations, and they force one to ask big questions.
When I first read about the terrible road accident that Year of the Knife got into this past June, I was horrified by the details. While driving from Salt Lake City to Colorado Springs, the band’s van crashed into the back of an 18-wheeler semitruck—crushing the vehicle and sending everyone to the hospital with a wide range of injuries. Madi Watkins, the band’s singer and wife to guitarist Brandon, suffered the worst of it. In addition to broken bones, she sustained a severe traumatic brain injury that left her in critical condition for days in the aftermath, and she remained hospitalized until a little under a month ago, when she was finally allowed to go home.
As Madi navigates the long recovery ahead of her, Brandon is navigating his own path forward—not only as her husband and caretaker, but as a co-steward for their work in Year of the Knife. No Love Lost, the new album out this week and their first full album with Madi on lead vocals, is a bittersweet moment then. On one hand, this album is an incredible milestone in the band’s story of resilience and adaptation, and Madi’s ownership of her new role is palpable. On the other, this album also creates a definitive marker in Year of the Knife’s future, in which two eras will most likely emerge: pre-brain injury and post-brain injury.
“I [had that] thought with Madi,” Brandon told me, in an in-depth conversation about the band’s history of upheaval that will be published in full on Thursday. “I thought, ‘What if Madi wakes up and she doesn’t want to be with me anymore?’ Or, ‘What if Madi wakes up and she doesn’t want to do the band anymore?’ You know what I mean? All those things ran through my mind. Being able to talk with her about it afterwards, when she’s in a better state like she’s in now, all of those thoughts of mine have been disproven, thankfully. But it totally would have made sense for her to wake up and be like, ‘This band fucking sucks. I almost died. Why would I want to do this again?’”
It’s too early to know how Madi will work through her own personal revelations from a traumatic brain injury, and surely everyone processes these things differently. Talking to Brandon, though, I only realized for the first time how confusing and frustrating it must be for the caretaker of someone in recovery, and his honest answers gave me a new sense of appreciation for my own caretaker. After I left the hospital, Rob Fish from 108 opened his home to me for as long as I needed before I felt strong enough to go home again. He gave me time and space to recover, managed my personal and medical affairs, and let me watch as many episodes of Law & Order that I wanted. That took months. Like Brandon for Madi, he took on the responsibility of making sure that my present needs were met, while also trying to project future optimism—for me, for himself, for my loved ones. Quite frankly, this is exhausting work. So much so that I found myself asking Brandon a question that I somehow never thought to ask Rob, namely, “Are you taking care of yourself?”
III.
On this, the twentieth anniversary of my traumatic brain injury, I want to focus on how I made it through. I had the incredible love and support of my close friends, who gifted me with patience and understanding, of course. I had a kind employer who insisted on paying my rent for as long as I needed. I was blessed with a brother as dear as Rob, who offered everything to me and never asked for anything in return. I will probably never be able to repay these debts.
But I’ve never quite had the opportunity to properly acknowledge the ways in which the hardcore community came through for me, too. After Revelation Records posted details of my accident on their website—as well as an address, “if you wish to send Norman a card or letter”—the scene responded with literally boxes of mail that were delivered to my hospital bedside. These letters moved me, entertained me, and nourished my desire to recover. At a time when your brain is fixated on nothing else besides searching for clarity, there is no clearer message than knowing that dozens, if not hundreds of people you have never met took the time to compose a personal letter, most of them written by hand, and mailed it to you just to say: “Your life matters to me.” I held onto many of these letters for years after the fact because they felt like proof that hardcore was a home.
I have never met Madi Watkins. I hope to meet her, and perhaps someday, look back on her own traumatic brain injury with the same kind of love and gratitude that I’ve accrued over mine in the last twenty years. The hardcore scene has already shown up for Year of the Knife with an overwhelming amount of support—raising over $250,000 for the band’s recovery fund, for one thing—and I know from experience that this will never be lost on Madi or the band. It’s no small thing to be carried by your community when you can’t walk on your own. And even though our hardcore lyrical tropes sometimes suggest that “survival of the strong” is an individual pursuit, we know by our conduct that healing is a group effort.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Brandon Watkins of Year of the Knife.
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I too suffered a TBI 32 years ago. I too do not remember the car accident. Luckily, the worse of it for me was losing teeth and the tip of my tongue. I couldn't run a straight line but that soon went away. I still have moments of impulsivity and anger, but I have been able to navigate my way through life. I am grateful everyday for my family and the ability to work as an registered nurse for 20 plus years.
Norman, I was once hit by a car myself when I was in junior high so I can relate to the pain and fear you were going through but my experience when I look back at my trauma what really bothers me about this is how the medical establishment operates especially when it comes to brain injuries. As John Maynard Keynes said in 1942 in the midst of ww2 ““anything we can actually do, we can afford” Now it took me sometime to figure out what that meant. I was reading on the national institute of health website that : “frogs possess the astonishing capacity to regenerate lost cells in several regions of their brains” Now the COVID-19 vaccine proves that state finances aren’t not like household finances. They are limitless the U.S. government proved that with the coronavirus. Here was something we as humans never encountered. But pharmaceutical industry was able to find a vaccine for COVID pretty quickly and U.S. government paid for all the research and development of the COVID 19 vaccine (there were no fund raising) why can’t we apply these limitless resources to brain injury research?