The Weird Symptoms of My Traumatic Brain Injury-and the Freak Accident That Caused It

Why is it so hard to spot a TBI?

- ANTONIA DEPACE AND KRISTY ALPERT

I knew I'd seen her white-framed glasses before, many times even, but I was still unable to summon her name. Anxiety swept over me as she entered the Blue Yoga Nyla studio that spring morning of 2017 in North Little Rock, Arkansas. It wasn't teaching jitters it was my studio, after all, and I'd taught some 12,000 classes by that point. No, this was something else. Names, yoga sequences, even numbers continued to escape my memory throughout that class-just some of the side effects, I would later learn, from my untreated brain injury.

The night before, my husband and I had fallen asleep as usual, our ceiling fan whirring above us, our room's air vents open on both sides of it. Also typical: I woke chilled in the middle of the night and stood on the bed in a haze to close the vent above my side. I felt the pain in my back first, after I was thrown to the ground. Then I felt the cut above my temple where the ceiling fan had struck me. My husband sprang from bed, as confused as I was, to try to stop the bleeding with a rag.