Email from David Wiseman

Email from David Wiseman:
05 Nov 2014

First let it be said that Cheryl and I are back at home in Canada and settling in just fine. Sort of.

On June 29th I borrowed a Honda Recon ATV in order to reduce the time lost in getting back and forth between the Malumghat Guest House and Memorial Christian Hospital where I was working on a few small network issues. I spent a few minutes getting used to the quad-bike and then set off for the hospital. That’s the last thing I remember for nearly 3 days.

Apparently the bike and I had a disagreement with the wet brick paving and I came off of it. My abrupt departure from the bike apparently also involved a tree, a rock and a ditch in which I landed face down. Fortunately a couple of the local house workers saw me go down and were there to get me out of the water quickly. Also fortunately two of the doctors were just finishing off their lunches within a short distance of my accident site and they were looking after me within 5 minutes. Their quick response got most of the water out of my left lung and helped them stop the development of pneumonia.

3 days later I woke up having missed a rush trip back to Chittagong for a CT scan (which showed little enough that I wasn’t medi-vacced to Bangkok). I would spend a week in the hospital at Malumghat before being sent home. Home to Canada that is as the physicians had decided that they could not provide me the medical attention I needed. We left via Chittagong a week earlier than we had intended. Nathan and Dorthy Piovesan accompanied us all the way back to Toronto. I don’t remember much of the flight.

Since being back we’ve been visiting all sorts of medical people. But why you ask? Well that comes because of what I managed to do to myself.

First, I have a concussion. The MRI scan taken a month ago shows some rather severe bruising to the front and sides of my brain. I’ve lost most of the ability to make what the doctors keep calling ‘executive decisions’ and my memory is faulty at the best of times. I find that if I do not concentrate on any physical action I take, I will mess it up and likely knock things on the floor.

Second, I damaged my right ear. Perhaps worst was that I damaged the balance organ in the right ear (and perhaps in the left ear as well) and this is causing vertigo: the world keeps spinning away from me and my brain believes it and I tend to fall down. Damage was also done to the audio portion of the right ear; I’m almost deaf to all mid-range sounds. To make it weirder, the upper and lower range sounds are being amplified and I need to wear an earplug in the right ear in order to reduce the amplification. There is a chance that I also did cochlea damage but this hasn’t been “proven” as of yet. They are also waiting until they correct the right ear balance issues before worrying about what may be wrong in the left ear. I also have tinnitus in that right ear which keeps singing about as loud as a worship team.

Third, I had a hair-line fracture to the rear of my skull. Given the lack of bruising to the back of my brain, the physicians are somewhat confused by why this fracture was so “weak”. But I also managed to fracture my left wrist which no one caught until mid-September. By that time it had partially healed itself (crooked but they aren’t going to fix it). So I am now wearing a compression bandage on that wrist to keep it under control. This makes it nearly impossible to do anything with my left hand, leaving me as a one-handed wonder quite quick
to knock everything over.

Fourth, I’m suffering from whiplash. Nearly every muscle and tendon I own is sore most of the time. I’m taking a lot of pain killers and working with some strange exercises.

I find I can concentrate for no more than one to three hours each day. After that much time my brain just quits and my ability to stand or walk around starts to decrease quickly. I’m not getting much accomplished very quickly.

It took me 2 months just to get the Internet working at home and another month to solve some of the other computing problems that were waiting in our home equipment when we got back. And after dealing with all of these things there hasn’t been much brain left to deal with the things I was supposed to be working on. Sigh.

So now the full story is in your hands. I’m not dead but sometimes I don’t have much brain. I suspect that I’m very slowly getting “better” but they’ve told me that it could take from one to five years to “undo” the damage caused by the concussion. The audiologist is NOT suggesting a time-to-recover for the ear although he is hopeful that he can correct the vertigo-inducing problem.

There was a lot that I wanted to get finished in August but very little happened in either July or August. If I left you waiting for stuff from me, well… I’ve likely got all of my notes but you may need to remind me what I was supposed to be finishing. And, yes, for those of you who have tried, I’ve been off of Skype and I’m still nearly 800 e-mail messages behind where I was when the accident happened. Hopefully none of those email messages are too important.
Some of the students at WCA will know about the accident (few details) as I did end up in a Google chat with Eva (Class 10) earlier today. She was the first person in Chittagong that I told about all of this as today was the first day when I actually felt like I could talk about it (and make sense). This e-mail message has been over a week in “preparation” — yes, I’m that slow.
Back in my high school days (in South Africa) a friend and I managed to hitch a lift into Johannesburg one day with an older gentleman. He drove incredibly slowly on the highway and Andre and I were noticeably confused. The gentleman driving looked at us and said “I don’t go fast, but I get there!” That’s me now.

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— magi (David Wiseman)