The Crash Was Minor. The Fog It Left Behind Was Not.

A stupid little fall

The accident that changed my year was almost comically minor. I was riding my bike on a quiet road near our house outside Portland, early on a Sunday, going slowly, and a dog came out of nowhere and I grabbed too much front brake and went over the bars at maybe fifteen miles an hour. I landed, got up, swore at the dog, which had already lost interest, and rode home with a scraped elbow and a dented helmet, feeling like an idiot.

That is the part people do not understand about these things. It was nothing. I did not black out, not really, just a weird blank second or two. I did not go to the hospital, because who goes to the hospital for falling off a bike in their own neighborhood. I iced the elbow, told my wife the funny version at dinner, and went to work on Monday like normal.

Except nothing was quite normal after that, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the two.

The fog that would not lift

It started small. I would read a paragraph in a work email and get to the end and have no idea what it said. Not tiredness, exactly. More like the words went in and nothing happened. I would walk into the kitchen and stand there having completely lost the thread of why. I am a project manager. My entire job is holding a dozen threads at once, and the threads kept slipping out of my hands.

Then the sleep went. I have always slept like a stone, my whole life, but now I would lie there wired and blank at once, exhausted and unable to switch off, my brain idling loud and useless at two in the morning. By day I was in a kind of gray fog, functioning, but like I was operating myself by remote control from a room slightly behind my own eyes. Light bothered me. Noise bothered me. My patience, never my strong suit, thinned to nothing, and I snapped at my kids over things that did not deserve it, and then lay awake hating myself for it.

The doctors who found nothing

I did eventually see my doctor, months in, when my wife essentially made the appointment and drove me there. He was thorough and kind. He asked about the bike fall, which I had almost forgotten, and used the word concussion, which startled me, because I associated concussions with football players and real hospitals, not a slow tip-over on a Sunday road.

The scans were clear, which is apparently normal and somehow not reassuring at all. There is a particular frustration in being told that nothing is wrong when you know, with total certainty, that something is wrong, that the person you used to be is in there somewhere behind a sheet of frosted glass. The general advice was time, rest, patience, and that most of these post-concussion situations resolve on their own. For a lot of people they do. Mine, stubbornly, mostly did not, or not fast enough, and the months stacked up and I started to quietly despair that this fog was simply who I was now.

Going down the rabbit hole

Despair makes you a researcher. On the nights I could not sleep, which were most of them, I read everything I could find about post-concussion recovery, the good and the dubious and the frankly ridiculous. I learned to be skeptical fast, because there is a lot of nonsense sold to desperate people, and I was exactly the kind of desperate person it is sold to.

Somewhere in all that reading I kept coming across neurofeedback, which I had vaguely heard of and assumed was fringe. The more carefully I read, though, the more it seemed to be a real, studied approach, the basic idea being that you can train the brain's own electrical patterns over time with feedback, the way you might train any other system through repetition and information. What caught my attention specifically was finding out there were legitimate ways to do neurofeedback at home, under proper remote supervision, rather than only in a clinic across town that I would have to drive to, foggy and light-sensitive, twice a week.

That last part mattered more than it might sound. In the state I was in, the logistics of regular clinic visits felt genuinely insurmountable. The driving, the waiting rooms, the fluorescent lights, the sheer executive effort of getting myself somewhere on a schedule when I could barely hold the thread of a sentence. The possibility of doing the actual training from my own quiet house, on my own terms, was the difference between something I might actually stick to and something I would abandon by week two.

Letting myself try something

I am a cautious, skeptical person by nature, the guy who reads every review twice, and I went back and forth for weeks. What tipped me was realizing I had already spent the better part of a year doing nothing but waiting and hoping, and the waiting was not working. I was not getting the old version of me back by sheer patience. At some point the cautious thing and the brave thing swapped places, and continuing to do nothing became the reckless option.

So I looked seriously into proper neurofeedback therapy at home, the supervised kind with actual clinicians involved rather than some gadget you buy and are left alone with. That distinction was important to me. I did not want a toy. I wanted something with real people overseeing it who understood what they were looking at, even if the sessions themselves happened on my own couch. The structure of doing at home neurofeedback with that kind of oversight was what finally let the skeptic in me say yes.

The slow, unspectacular return

I want to be honest, because the dishonest version of this would be a miracle story, and it was not a miracle. It was slow and undramatic and sometimes boring. You do not feel a lightning bolt. You sit, you do the sessions, you keep to the schedule, and for a while it feels like nothing much is happening, which when you are already discouraged is its own test of faith.

The change, when it came, came the way dawn comes, so gradually you cannot name the moment. I noticed one evening that I had read an entire article, a real one, and actually knew what it had said. A few weeks later I realized I had slept through a whole night, and then another. The fog did not vanish so much as thin, steadily, until one ordinary morning I was standing in the kitchen and I remembered why I had walked in, and I actually laughed out loud, alone, at how absurdly good it felt to complete that tiny circuit that most people never think about.

My patience came back before I fully noticed, which my kids noticed first. My daughter mentioned, offhand, that I was being nicer lately, and it nearly took my legs out from under me, because it meant she had registered how un-nice the fogged version of her father had been, and how long it had lasted.

What I know now

I am mostly myself again. Not a hundred percent on every day, but close enough that I no longer feel like I am remote-controlling my own life from a room behind my eyes. I ride my bike again, carefully, and I wear a helmet that I replaced without arguing about the cost, and I give dogs a very wide berth.

The thing I would tell anyone in that fog is the thing I needed someone to tell me. A clear scan does not mean you are imagining it. Waiting is a strategy, but it is not the only one, and when waiting is quietly costing you your work and your temper and your nights, it is reasonable to go looking for something that gives your brain actual help rather than just time. I spent far too long being too proud and too skeptical to try, treating my fog as a life sentence I simply had to serve. It was not a life sentence. It was a stupid little fall and a long strange year, and the way out, in the end, ran right through my own living room.