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NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—is a month of writing every single day in November to create a 50,000-word novel. This writing community and event includes anyone, no matter your ability; it releases your imagination; and it’s taxing. Typing is physical. Striding out the front door to meditate in nature or on a long city walk is physical and mental exercise. Writing is mentally onerous for obvious reasons.
Knowing NaNoWriMo's physical and mental exertions, I plan my month out carefully. Writing daily drains energy resources, stiffens my neck, and cramps my fingers. Creating a story challenges my still-repairing imagination and my healing cognitive abilities of concentration, memory, organization, planning, initiation, and motivation. NaNoWriMo is set up so that it fires up the latter two; still, some days I have to be able to get myself to look at the website or NaNoWriMo's Twitter in order to receive that firing up. Even a half-hour of daily writing consumes energy. By the time I’m done writing for the day, I’m fatigued in every way possible.
The standard medical model of brain injury care is to teach you to pace. I quickly learned that pacing and writing don't mix for me for two reasons:
- When I stop writing and take a break, even the recommended three-minute break, I lose track of my story. I have to start all over again. That consumes cognitive energy, which accelerates my fatigue.
- Once I stop writing, it’s difficult for me to start up again. Even though I can literally feel the energy drain out of my muscles and my brain when I keep going, I can complete a chapter and it’s fairly coherent. When I stop, I cannot complete it. That's psychologically disheartening. That kind of emotion robs anyone of energy.
In 2011, when Google+ was around, I decided to blog on my NaNoWriMo progress. Google+ made it easy. Just write and press Share. I blogged right after my post-writing snack before I forgot the things that had cropped up during that day’s writing. It was probably not the wisest thing to do because it compounded my fatigue and made it harder to recover.
At the same time, I kept up my new exercise routine and walking.
I had learned in 2009 that brain injury can affect the heart such that too much exercise, and certain kinds of exercise like rowing, can cause a person with brain injury to be short of breath, edematous, and have worrying thermoregulation problems. In 2010 when no physician would do more than simply monitor me, I developed a hypothalamus fix to reduce my edema, help me breathe easier, and reverse my body burning up, something that had sent me to the ER in 2007 (see Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me). One of the nice side benefits was my exercise tolerance slowly improved. A year later, in October 2011, I started being able to walk farther. I could walk to nearby places I hadn’t been able to for years. Very liberating—although as was my wont, I kind of overdid it.
I didn't want to give that up nor the increase in my exercise routine only a month after I'd tasted the freedom of being able to walk farther.
My injured brain decided otherwise.
I began to get extremely weak. I mentally stalled as the days wore on. I began to wake up so tired, I had barely any energy or thought. I’d remind myself I wrote Lifeliner when fatigue was much, much worse, when I could write only once or twice a week for less than an hour each time. Didn’t help. Then after a couple of weeks of will powering my way through NaNoWriMo, wondering if I’d ever have a scintilla of energy again, I remembered: mental work is as taxing as exercise to a person with a brain injury. No wonder I was getting short of breath again. No wonder my body temperature had returned to burn levels instead of the broil it had dropped down to.
Increasing mental work while not decreasing physical exercise commensurately was a really bad idea.
This lesson no one had taught me. I had to learn it through nasty experience in 2006 and 2007. Because brain injury impairs the ability to remember lessons learned, I had had to learn it all over again in 2011.
I scaled back my exercise down to 20 minutes then 10 from 30, and I didn’t exercise on days I went to the physiotherapist or to see the doctor. Suddenly my energy rose up enough for me to feel pleasure in writing my third novel Time and Space. An endless desire for sleep and rest no longer ruled my days.
After NaNoWriMo ended on Nov. 30, I began scaling back up to my old exercise routine, but it took longer than I’d expected. That's part and parcel of brain injury. Recovery takes longer than what you plan for.
Several years afterward, after new brain injury treatments, continuing spontaneous improvement, and regular use of my home devices, I began to be able to walk for exercise after my brain training or medical appointment. I began to be able to do my weights and write on the same day. Today, I don't have to worry about becoming short of breath, retaining water, or burning up—unless I have certain kinds of emotional stress on top of heavy mental work and exercise. And I haven't reached the levels that sent me to the ER.
This is why I advocate for active treatments that heal brain injury, why I believe Medicare should pay for neurostimulation treatments and home devices: people should not have to choose between physical or mental activities. Good health care heals both mind and body, keeps them in balance, and provides a person with purpose and a feeling of well-being.
Copyright ©2020 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy. May not be reprinted or reposted without permission.
