(Background Bits)
I'm M.D. Birmingham and to be honest I haven't been able to do much leisure reading since Feb 11th, 2007. The year of 2007 after awakening (emerging & merging) from my 63 day non-responsive coma reading wasn't an ability that I was easily capable to do. It's not because I couldn't read and comprehend (as with illiteracy), or my earlier stages of hand dexterity deficits (no gross motor skills). It wasn't because of shortened attention span due to stimuli overload; it was my double vision (best generally explained as a side effect from my coma and injury nature of DAI). Whether it was a large magazine page or typically sized book, whenever I looked at the words on the page it was like staring at a “wordsearch.” All the letters were jumbled on the page and it took much consistent effort to retrain my vision to follow the page line by line; along with my mind.
Aside from books and pages with writing, typical exit signs and labels with writing (on doors, etc) that I encountered in my "world" (inpatient hospitalized stay) were seen either as a “wordsearch” or double. The double vision caused the same object to appear as you would see if you were to cross your eyes while reading this. One set of the writing is slightly off to the other side (left or right) and a bit lower than its "twin." I did overcome this challenge through the help of time and creating my own strategies to no longer see double but only one object (like 1year olds or younger, vision tests were obviously not possible). Needless to say, that was only one challenge I overcame to write my own autobiography titled Getting There... and yes I did type it entirely prior to submitting as a galley; along with this whole message.
During the final days to my book’s “being” before becoming "live" to the public I personally made this website which contains links to the web address (photos, etc) mentioned in the book and other links such as FB pages and Twitter. You are welcome to follow my trail of "crumbs" that will lead you to both desire more and satiation.
