Roebling

So you crashed so hard your brain went back in time? Damn!

 

My expert opinion, as someone with zero medical training, is that it was the morphine. I am missing four days of my life, from about 30 minutes before the crash until waking up from neck surgery on day #4. I'm told I had normal conversations with family and friends the whole time.

 

That would make me worry about what my family considers normal conversations that involve me.

 

Nowhere near the time span but I guess it's probably common for this sort of thing to happen under the right circumstances. I can't remember how I crashed in T2/Nashville. I can remember going into T1, then I remember what can only be described as "I woke up in the middle of a crash." That bugged me more than any other crash I experienced because it felt like there was nothing to learn from it. Not knowing what I did wrong really f**ked with my mind for a year or more.

 

More likely the anesthesia than the opiate, but anything’s possible.

Were you concussed? Could also be a post-concussive phenomenon.

 

I think it's a little strange that the anesthesia would reset me to just around the time they started giving me morphine at the track but like I said, I'm not exactly a doctor.

I have no idea if there was a concussion. They did not even notice that my shoulder was broken (I found out years later from a completely unrelated x-ray), so I wouldn't be surprised if they missed a concussion.

 

How would you know?

 

Besides known symptoms, aren't there tests that medical staff do? What do they do under those tents in the NFL?

 

There are, but I suspect that they were overwhelmed by your other symptoms.

When someone has a compound humerus fracture, you don't treat their hangnail.

 

That's later where the physician requires a consult and a $2,000 co-pay.

 

The concussion and brain injury procedures have changed significantly only recently. At least that's the impression I get. I have not been through something like HPPT. I have broken two helmets in crashes, multiple skull fractures on one and they didn't even look on the other. They only scanned the one because the helmet cut through the skin to my forehead above my eye and needed lots of stitches. Beyond noting the fractures in the one case they did nothing for my brain. I think that would (or could if I chose) be different today. Back then they focused on my other broken bones but no meaningful evaluation of brain injury.

 

I get that. I was on answering the question. It was never a concern of mine at the time or later.
The shoulder, though, that seriously pissed me off in hindsight. All those times they rolled me on my side in the hospital and I moaned or even screamed in pain, no one thought to check…

 

Yeah, that's bullshit. Did they just ignore it or did they say it was some ghost nerve pain?

So... Something I've wondered about: you've mentioned before that you and Elon Musk went to college together, and had at least overlapping social circles. Musk is, as I understand it, working on neural connections directly from the brain to computers. If a reliable and robust two way communications link can be established between the biological neuron and the artificial silicon brains, it's a... no brainer... to utilize that to connect a human brain to a wearable suit that would enable most of the things that able bodied humans do.

Have you ever considered reaching out to him and volunteer to be a guinea pig for such research? Are others working on similar topics?

 

Nah, last time I swapped emails with Elon was just after he sold PayPal.

And I don't really keep up with advances in medical science. I accepted within the first year that all that stuff was going to benefit the next generation or, at worst, the one after that. I've never been under the illusion that there was a chance that they were going to fix me. Statistically, I'm not even supposed to be here.

 

As someone who has watched at least three episodes of lawyerin'-related TV shows, I would advise you to step away from the keyboard for this thread.

 

Yeah, opiates routinely cause delirium, so you might have incoherent or incomplete memorials, but they don’t usually cause amnesia - anesthetics do though.

Was your helmet damaged in the crash? If so, you likely had a mild concussion.

 

I had a closed head injury that nobody told me about. Ever. All I knew is I would read something and not comprehend what I read. 4.5 months later it just went away over night. I finally read all my medical records about 7 months post injury and that's how I found out. I guess they were too busy with the SCI and 27 broken bones.

 

Damn. From a motorcycle accident?

 

Big crash in T1 at RRR back in 2013 when the engine seized in my 2T racebike. The trees are VERY close to the race track.