In which an Ashland.news reporter takes a fall, lays down her news pen and picks up her art brush

Editor’s note: We regret to report that Ashland.news city reporter Morgan Rothborne has resigned from the staff after a bit more than two years with us, as she continues to work on recovery from a head injury in June, as detailed in this first-person report. Prior to Ashland.news, Rothborne reported for the Rogue Valley Times and Medford Mail Tribune. We appreciate her fine observational skills, her writing with nuance, poise and flair, and ever-uplifting personality. All the best, Morgan! —Bert Etling, executive editor, Ashland.news

By Morgan Rothborne

Fall

It was the day of the rare pink full moon when I fell and hit my head.

I was making conversation with the judo teacher about it while I stretched on the mat, waiting for my jiu jitsu teacher to arrive. A new regimen of private lessons, twice a week, was his idea to help me go up a belt and make up for lost time after a training hiatus. I was happy to be back in the gym.

“Yeah, my friend who’s also a journalist, we’ve been joking about it for days. Weird news stories kept coming in, and she was like, ‘What, is there a full moon?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, yes.’ Weird news keeps coming, so we’re like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’” I said.

My phone rang – the chief of police calling me back. I jumped up and stepped out to my car where I stretched out in the backseat. The tools of the trade were waiting in a milk crate behind the driver’s seat. Instant coffee, Band Aids, snacks, pens and notebooks were always kept stocked.

I scribbled down the answers to questions about a crackdown on speeding e-bikes, then tossed the notebook in the passenger seat.

When I stepped back in the gym, the judo teacher seemed to have a dark look in his eye. He cut off my attempt to resume conversation by calling my teacher to see where he was. He was busy being a dad, he forgot, could we reschedule. I turned to leave and the judo teacher turned to me.

“We could train if you want,” he said.

I almost left. But we squared up on the mat, him taking hold of the sleeve of my gi, and I of his. I had trained with him a couple times when my teacher wasn’t available. I preferred the physical geometry of jiu jitsu, pressing and puzzling a way out of stress positions until someone is overwhelmed and taps out. Judo seemed to be so much throwing and being thrown. I had just learned how to properly fall last week.

“I’ll teach you this leg sweep. It’s not the one I’m best at. Let me try to remember,” he said, apparently trying to remember.

He struck out with it suddenly.

I was helpless to gravity. In my surprise, I forgot to tuck my chin and fell backward like a tree, rocked my head into the mat with the force of the fall. My teeth clattered together.

“I think I hit my head,” I said as I stood up with my hand on it.

He sounded compassionate, saying he was sorry and offering a water break. I almost left again. But I was loathe to let even a friend see me sweat or cry. The pain was fading fast, and his feet hadn’t left the mat yet.

We squared up again, and within a few steps, something was wrong: an indescribable, eerie feeling, akin to immediately after you hear an air raid siren but before the threat is known.

Then a wave of just sick.

It was all suppressed. I learned and treated him to the same leg sweep and trained for a half hour longer than normal. He even brought out the mock weapons and taught me how to use a pen if I didn’t have a knife,since he was aware of my profession.

Wrong

I sat down with that e-bike story at home. Words swam. Reading and looking at the screen was irritating. My mind wandered. There was a brief consideration something could be really wrong.

“Don’t be a baby. File your story,” I said to myself.

I checked and double checked my notes, unusually unsure of myself. I finally filed it with a note to my editors: “Please proofread this carefully. I hit my head in judo today.”

The executive editor for Ashland.news texted me.

“… honestly, if you have any symptoms at all, you should go to the ER and get checked out — was just reading the other day how head injuries can seem OK early on, but then later the brain starts to swell, and it’s not good …”

I said I would sleep this off and be fine, then continued to text another editor finalizing art and other details for the story, dragged myself out to see that pink moon, then had to wait through another mysterious wave of sick before finally going to sleep convinced I was fine.

In the morning, I opened my eyes to an orphan wave of emotion: the urge to cry for no reason, followed by a wave of that eerie feeling of deep wrong, stronger than before. I stood up as if that would shake this off and went to brush my teeth. In the mirror, my pupils were moons.

“Alright, I’ll go to the ——- hospital,” I said to my reflection.

Hurt

In dressing, I did not neglect my beloved jewelry, packed my backpack with my laptop and notepad like always, and drove to the ER, as calmly as if I was driving to work.

Walking into the building, I cupped my hands around the sunglasses on my face in a growing abhorrence to light. In the hospital room, the doctor asked what happened. I listened to my own words come out in broken circles before finally collapsing on a statement that maybe nothing was wrong, and I was just being silly.

The doctor’s eyes took on something like pity.

“We’ve lowered the threshold of what constitutes a brain injury. If your pupils are dilated, that’s really not good. Is your neck swollen?” he said.

It was.

He ordered a CT scan and had scarcely left the room when the first wave of vertigo circled. An hour later, I was curled up in the bed, waiting for the anti-nausea medication to kick in, fingers pressed to my ears. Someone across the hall made the most pathetic retching sounds. Everyone has an “Anything But That.” Indiana Jones had snakes. Mine is vomit. The hands on the clock seemed motionless. I thought about how I’ve always felt God has an excellent sense of humor. It’s so dry.

The CT scan came back normal, and the doctor came in with a nurse to discharge me. It was difficult to listen to what they were trying to tell me. I was very interested in the idea of a nice dark hole to curl up and die in. The doctor said it was probably made worse by continuing to work my body and mind after the fall.

“I want you to go home and rest. No texting, no screens, no reading,” he said.

“Audiobooks?” I asked.

“No. That’s too stimulating. Your brain needs to rest to heal,” the nurse said.

“I’m supposed to lie down in the dark and do nothing?” I asked.

The nurse made a tight smile.

“We want you to be bored,” she said.

Wandering

I stopped at the pharmacy on the way home and picked up a prescription of the anti-nausea pills, then coiled up in bed.

Days and nights passed, time’s patterned flow replaced by waves of delirium.

I drifted between states of consciousness, previously unexplored. Memories — toddler years to teen years to as recent as a year ago — floated through my mind. The eerie vertigo feeling circled. Sometimes my brain felt pressed against my skull as if it would burst.

In lucid moments, I watched the ceiling fan blades spin overhead and wondered if I was dying.

There’s more than one way to die. The brain controls everything. The right kind of brain bleed could be responsible for any number of physical or mental handicaps, or so I imagined.

My dreams and passions flickered in my mind: exploring the globe and wilderness trails, jiu jitsu, swimming, horses, all my unfinished novels and manuscripts, art projects, earning my pilot’s license. All hoped-for future things seemed to dangle on a thread.

“This is more stimulating than an audiobook,” I would tell myself.

Words

During a violent spell of overwhelm, it was sickening pain to think in words, but my mind would not stop thinking in words. Two scraps of thought floated up from somewhere. The first I clung to like a sailor shipwrecked in a storm.

“There is no bodhi tree or stand of mirror bright,” a critique of earlier Zen Buddhism I read seven months prior.

To meditate on the bodhi tree where Buddha received enlightenment or the mind as clear glass or any idea about purity was an impurity because purity is a concept. Using images to think about nothing beyond nothing was enough of a logic break to stop my thoughts. It seemed imperative to clear my mind.

The second scrap circled like a bird of prey, a stanza from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”:

“I will show you something greater than your shadow gliding behind you by morning or your shadow rising to meet you by evening. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

A member of my found family found out I was hurt when he texted to invite me for coffee on a normal day for him and Day 1 of this world of dust for me.

After that, he called daily to “make sure your bloated corpse doesn’t need to be carried out of there.”

A day came that felt like a fever breaking. He called and asked how I was feeling.

“I feel better.”

“Good, you sound better,” he said, obviously relieved.

Every day I told him I was fine and tried to act like that was true.

“How did I sound before?” I asked.

“Um … you were rambling, a little slow on the uptake. You didn’t sound like you. I was worried,” he said.

It became easier to leave my bed. My mind was increasingly lucid, but my brain struggled to digest light or language. Reading was painful, writing by hand nauseating, even if I closed my eyes. Conversation was an unpleasant labor: hear words, translate their meaning, think of a response.

I slept more, and night dreams became vivid. I woke one morning from a dream of three interviews I was shaping into a story, even as my waking mind recoiled from language.

It was a Friday when I finally felt like a shaky shell of myself, but myself. I opened up my laptop, worked until it hurt, then went for a walk along my usual 3-mile loop. Thus began “The Week of Hubris,” as I call it.

Regression

I tried to resume running but had to settle for long walks. I went to coffee with a friend who barely persuaded me not to resume jiu jitsu, worked every day, scheduled a tattoo appointment to privately commemorate my experience, and somehow made it out to the Britt Festival and back because another friend had offered a chance to take in Beethoven and Brahms.

At the time, I reasoned it was because of circumstance, but that music I have loved all my life was alive in a new way. The strains of it evoked feelings of color — the Brahms golden, the Beethoven shades of purple, a range of deep violet to the pale lavender of twilight.

Two days later I was tacking up blankets, scarves, anything I could find — the blinds weren’t enough — before diving into bed swallowed whole in a migraine. Here lies a fog.

I know I tried to work the next day, wearing sunglasses to look at the screen before being driven back to bed. The executive editor urged me to go to urgent care. I shuddered at the thought of fluorescent lights and waited for the symptoms to temper.

In the exam room, they pulled the blinds and dimmed the lights to allow me to remove the sunglasses that had become a lifeline — a cheap pair purchased on a whim from a sidewalk shop in Paris.

“We’re going to have you do a neurological test, OK?” a nurse practitioner said. “Palms up on your lap. Now flip them over. And back and forth again. OK, good. Now stand up, balance on one leg. OK, good. Now arms out like you’re holding a pizza and you don’t want to drop it. Eyes closed and stay like that. OK, you’re good.”

He gestured for me to sit down again.

“I’m a little concerned you went into such a severe regression so far out from the initial injury,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s because you went back to work too soon or what. I’m going to order a CT scan for your brain. It looks like at the ER, they only scanned your neck.”

He prescribed at least another week in the dark, but at least conceded to my plea for audiobooks.

“How long will it take to recover? Is there anything I should or shouldn’t do?” I asked.

“I wish I could tell you. Concussions are hard. Your brain is a muscle. If it hurts, don’t do it,” he said.

Then he looked me dead in my eyes. His next words were measured and deliberate: “And if your symptoms get worse, don’t wait. Go to the ER.”

Brain

The same found family friend drove me to Medford for the CT scan, and for $20 I became the proud owner of what I hope to be the only image produced of my living brain. The scan results were normal.

I found a map of the brain detailing the functions of each region. When I fell, I landed on my occipital lobe, responsible for vision and image recognition. On either side near the ears is the Wernicke’s area, used for comprehension of written and spoken language. In that neighborhood is also the region for hearing and the temporal lobe, which controls short term memory, associations, equilibrium, and emotion. Directly in front of the c lobe are some sensory data processing areas, and running the length of the brain from lobe to lobe is an area controlling hunger, pain, and “fight or flight.”

Years ago while shopping for a proper motorcycle helmet, I came across a video simulating impacts to the brain using a pink block of gelatin. The force of a blow moved in ripples like water, the largest near the impact site and rapidly declining as the pink mass absorbed it.

Acclimate

I began to adapt.

I taped down the lever in the fridge that triggers its interior light and unscrewed the bulbs in the bathroom — one switch turns on the fan and light, and the fan is needed to shower. I learned to clear the floor of any potential obstacle course, and my legs cleared of a kaleidoscope of bruises.

No electric light means living like it’s 1890. The world was bright, louder, and more pungent than before. Eating was difficult for the smells and the loudness of dishes.

A recurrent pattern showed itself throughout the ebbs and flows of partial recovery and remission. In the downswings, it sometimes took hours to make it through one piece of bread. In the upswings, a ravenous hunger for food exotic to my normal semi-vegetarian diet: red meat, cheese, fries. Salt was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.

Fire

During the Week of Hubris, I bought a book — “Journey to the Centers of the Mind” — and made it through a couple chapters. It descried the mechanics of cognition as neurons generating and exchanging electrical impulses using two ions — potassium and sodium.

I don’t know if this was the cause of the drive for salt, but I increased my intake of fermented foods such as miso and sauerkraut to keep from licking the inside of a bag of chips.

Attempted walks ended staring forlorn down familiar paths, picturing myself crumpled on the ground like roadkill. I got a yoga mat and practiced careful body weight exercises to protect the health of my muscular, skeletal, and circulatory systems.

“I’ll be better soon,” I told myself and everyone else.

Then came a tremendous storm.

The first booms of thunder drove me to the porch. I watched the lightning that followed as dusk gathered.

“That isn’t enough rain for the amount of fuel we have on the ground right now,” I thought.

I told my brain to deal with it, popped a pill, and turned on the scanner. Texts flew between editors and fellow journalists as dispatch crackled. I wanted to ride with my people. I wanted to be the one doing the work for everyone, the habit of devotion to this peculiar calling already enshrined on many repetitious days hinging on pots of coffee, peanut butter, and a continual baptism of ink on my skin and clothes.

Days passed, punctuated by incessant pinging from the Watch Duty app, and I kept checking, kept using the sunglasses and the pills to play through the pain. The fire south of the town I was responsible for was estimated to be 150 acres. I couldn’t stand it. I told my editors I could do something. I would call the emergency manager and the wildfire division chief in the morning. But when morning came, I could barely lift my head from the pillow long enough to pass along phone numbers and apologies.

Chasm

After the fire came a dark and watery time. The precise details are best confined to those with the proper credentials, such as those in possession of a psychology degree, a clerical collar, or a neat glass of whiskey and a dark sense of humor.

Every day some indeterminate number of hours were captured in states of complete overwhelm. Elements of my automatic nervous system faltered. My body struggled to regulate its temperature. Upon standing, as often as not the world spun, darkened, and filled with spots, forcing me to sink down or lean on something until it passed.

More friends and family insisted on offering help I was helpless but to accept. My aunt came over to help me apply for temporary disability through Paid Leave Oregon, her sitting at that nasty laptop screen, me on the floor, ice pack on my head, answering questions.

“What’s your social security number?”

“Where are your passwords again? I don’t see it.”

The application process seemed calculated to drive off or at least torment its applicants. With time spent on hold, deciphering the website, and waiting for a special letter containing a secret confirmation code to arrive snail mail, it took us around two weeks to apply.

A steady drumbeat of questions and comments deepened the chasm between myself and the outside world of daywalkers.

“Are you better yet? We need you.”

“What have you been able to do with all that time?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, you must be sick of that by now.”

Fight

I kept fighting.

From my earliest delirium, visions of new ways to layer paint and render ideas on canvas appeared behind my closed eyes. At first, I only stared at the dark silhouette of the easel in the corner. The first time I drew the curtain to cast light on the canvas, I recoiled, green and defeated.

But the next day I made it 15 minutes. Then an hour the next day. Two hours the day after that, then a day spent in sleep against my will.

I kept fighting. As long as my brain could stand it.

I swam in audiobooks. The Books of Moses. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Lectures on the Bible in its ancient, near-eastern context. The Arthashastra, Plato’s Republic, and several rounds of “The Wasteland,” intent on memorizing it.

I was getting better. I would be better the next week and the next week would be the next week. I spent more time on the floor on my knees or my back. I talked to God as I have not since I was a child. I was not confident my injured brain could judge itself if we needed to go to the hospital or not.

“If I have to go to the hospital, don’t make it something subtle, OK? Not something I can shrug off. If you’re going to take me out, don’t let me linger. I’ve suffered enough, I think. Give me a nice aneurysm, OK?”

I saw myself trapped in a slippery hole. The harder I tried to climb, the further back I seemed to slide. Something finally broke. I had one idea left, a relatively new theory, but it had held up a year or so. To solve a complex problem, invert it.

All this fighting, it was time to surrender.

I let fall any attachment to when or in what ways I would recover and did nothing but slept like a cat for a long time.

Then came days I could reliably stand without spots and get by without pills. I had another idea, a kind of reverse elimination diet akin to when someone is looking for an allergen. What were the biggest triggers, and where were my real limitations?

Truth

One by one, I reintroduced everything I had eliminated and watched my brain’s reaction. First, inviting a friend to my cave. Two hours of conversation, and it only took a few hours with the ice pack and one pill to recover.

I could reliably paint as long and sometimes walk about a mile.

I began to notice a strange phenomenon. If I laid around long enough, I would feel normal, get excited, get dressed and go outside, only to be driven back in retreat from a grotesque layer of saturated color, sound and scent.

It felt like walking through a nightmare. Still, I could, at least, work from home if I was getting so much better. I increased my screen time. The backslide was swift: two days spent laid out on the bed with an ice pack and pills, watching the shadows of furniture circle around the room with the sunlight stubbornly bleeding through my makeshift curtains.

Light behaves remarkably like water or truth, if you have the time to watch it.

But through this remission I was smiling. Found it, I thought.

Days later was a long-awaited appointment with a specialist, a sports medicine doctor with a subspecialty in concussions. She came in the exam room and found her nurse had drawn the blinds and turned off the lights in pity.

“Wow, you’re really miserable,” she said.

She held up well to the ensuing cavalcade of experiments and observations of my work as nurse and patient at once.

“Well, you’re doing everything I would have told you to do if I had seen you a month ago, but your symptoms are normal for days or weeks,” she said. “You’re eight weeks out. It’s time to get interventionalist.”

She explained my brain needed help learning how to use my eyes again, and she would refer me to neurological physical therapy and vision therapy.

“That’s a thing?” I asked.

“Yeah, you’re going to love it. Here, look at my nose,” she said, standing in front of me.

“Now tell me when you see ’em or if it’s too much or makes you dizzy,” she said as she moved pairs of wiggling fingers in and out of my peripheral vision.

Work

I was still thinking about that the following afternoon driving up Winburn Way, killing time while the pharmacy lingered on another refill of the pills.

Before, it was only disturbing to feel motion sick driving my own car. But now I noticed my peripheral vision sliding past in blocks of color as detailed as the road ahead.

I parked and walked out, a new idea brewing. The familiar nightmare feeling was more like a dream in the park. I realized my eyes weren’t focusing properly. A squirrel jumping many trees away to my right was as detailed as the creek rippling to my left. I sank down on a bench and looked up as a breeze moved through the leaves, and they moved individually and as a collective in a scrolling motion of vibrant green. I covered my eyes and laughed. Of course.

Riding a motorcycle is a skill I respected and put in due research. I remembered a particularly geeky rider on YouTube talking about why bikes are often hit by drivers who say they never saw the bike. Often they didn’t. The brain conserves energy to protect itself, he said. It indulges in things such as “highway hypnosis,” driving home without remembering the drive. The brain sees familiar territory and checks out as much as it can.

It has my studio memorized, I thought, but it has to work to see out in the world.

Nature

The doctor said it could take awhile to schedule the therapy. This seemed like a time to get busy living, or .…

At this time, the Oregon Health Plan sent a request for updated information to an address five years old. It took weeks of hours on hold and finally a drive out to the office for Jackson County Health & Human Services in Medford to get back on my plan, but by then I had been doing self-guided physical therapy every day.

One of my favorite medical studies compared the recovery of hospital patients: those with a view of trees from their window, and those with a view of the parking lot. Those with access to nature recovered faster. I drove into Lithia Park or went into my yard, using trees to practice focusing my eyes, then closing them and trying again until my brain said it was time for bed.

Within two weeks I could drive without feeling sick, only some pain from the sun or streetlights. It was easier to go outside, but I was still regularly held hostage in spells of overwhelm. Why couldn’t I heal? I had a new idea. Actually, a handful of ancient ones.

Medicine

My undergraduate thesis centered on the history of ideas from the ancient to the medieval period, specifically tracing the long thread of alchemy.

Medicine was a recurring facet of this research. The ghosts of the Hippocratic idea of health achieved through balancing a body’s humors are still with us in language. I’m of a melancholic disposition myself, an excess of black bile as opposed to a sanguine disposition with its excess of blood.

I once found a picture of a medieval clock for doctors, including an apparatus for tracking constellations. When possible, surgery or the letting of blood could be timed with stars best aligned to those a patient was born under, details of the individual considered to most accurately bring the body into balance.

Modern Western medicine applies mostly chemical or mechanical treatments with sterilized precision; fine for my knee injury a few years ago, maybe not for enough for the complexity of the brain.

A favorite term paper was on medical pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. If a patient didn’t get results from the hospitals imported during colonization, they may also go to a traditional healer. I read of one healer’s prescription for stomach troubles as both an herbal remedy and a long-avoided conversation with an estranged family member.

I had always heard of good things about acupuncture. These forms of Eastern medicine are in keeping with the old ways. In the waiting room, the lights were comfortably dim, and I was given a four-page questionnaire inquiring after everything from my normal diet to my trauma history.

Hide

I have always spoken very carefully around these first 23 years of life, never trusted people not to see me through it like an object behind a dark pane of stained glass. It was a private project.

Traditional therapy was quickly abandoned. Literature, theology, and history became guidance and comfort. I faced fears through play — motorcycles, jiu jitsu, airplanes.

The panic attacks remained like a mustard stain. They came at the same frequency as emptying the kitchen garbage and could last a couple hours. I suppressed and hid them.

When the acupuncturist said, “Tell me everything,” I gave as brief a sketch as possible and asked if this could be why I couldn’t heal. She affirmed it could be.

Laid out on a cushioned table, she circled my body methodically, placing tiny needles everywhere — ankles, knees, hands, shoulders, and, my favorite — the third eye between the eyebrows. She dimmed the lights further, turned on meditation music, and put a call button in my hand. She paused at the door.

“It’s your first time. You might just think the whole time, or you might get sleepy. Or you might go to what I like to call ‘acculand.’ Call if you need anything,” she said.

I went to acculand. Then the lights came back up and she was there, removing needles and asking how I felt.

“It’s my nervous system. That’s why I can’t heal,” I said.

She nodded.

“Your body can’t heal if it’s in fight or flight. It needs to be in a para-sympathetic state to heal. That’s part of how acupuncture heals you. It puts you in that state.”

Pain

Walking home, light bounced off the windows of cars and the pain began.

But I was in the afterglow of acculand. In that slowed state I saw it — the five-second delay before the pain triggered a panic attack that had previously been an indiscernible snarl of a feedback loop in my brain.

I pictured myself grabbing my nervous system by the collar.

Where do you think you’re going? It’s just pain. We’re not doing this anymore,I thought.

I big flare up came a few days later, but this time I could relax into the pain and it was just pain, fading faster. Recovery was easier. I continued acupuncture for weeks. A new peace entered my life, and a new creative fire surged up with it.

Decision

The typewriter — formally far too loud — was now accessible for longer and longer. My journal filled with a wider, more sweeping script. My sketchbook filled, too, with clean lines in a new style. Some days I had to pull myself away from the canvas, realizing how much time had passed, my hands shaking for want of another kind of food.

One night in September, I couldn’t sleep. The moon was full, the fourth since that rare pink one.

I decided to take stock, first remembering the chaos I was devoted to. When I opened my eyes, I checked social media and emails to see if there was anything I needed to jump up and write. The hours that followed were spent typing, texting, emailing, phone calls, more scrolling.

Keeping a finger on the pulses of ordinances, aggressive deer, meetings, rallies, fires, and cyanotoxic algal blooms. When the story says jump, the journalist says how high. I had tried to jump for a ripe pear in the tree out front and had to put myself to bed. I still needed rest as if I were elderly and had clawed my way to 40 minutes of screen time a day.

In the moonlight, I could see the stack of finished canvases, a big new self portrait unfinished on the easel, my journal and pen beside me. When I woke on the morning, I would listen to the birds singing.

I had a decision to make — the chaos of my old world, loud and pounding with blue and fluorescent light, or this new world growing in moonlit quiet.  

Morning

Days later in the grocery store, I was in the beauty aisle, reaching for something on the top shelf when someone recognized me.

“Hey, Morgan, how come you’re not writing news stories anymore?” he said.

I said something about a concussion.

“A brain injury…it’s an experience,” I said.

He nodded.

“Rewiring,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

Email freelance artist Morgan Marlowe, her nom de brush (as Rothborne was her nom de plume) at [email protected]. This story was written on an Olympia SM9 De Luxe manual typewriter, digitized by Ryan Pfeil.