Amidst the 9 months I attended 3 hospitals, to begin recovery from my critical (GCS 4) Traumatic Brain Injury, as well as during the first year and a half post hospital, when I stayed at my childhood homes (my dad’s & my mom’s houses on Mercer Island, in Seattle) I enacted both provoked as well as spontaneous confabulation.
“Confabulation is a neuropsychiatric disorder wherein a patient generates a false memory without the intention of deceit…The patient believes the statement to be truthful, hence the descriptive term “honest lying” & generates information as a compensatory mechanism to fill holes in one’s memories”. –National Library of Medicine
Specifically, provoked confabulation, is just as it sounds and often results from being asked a question.
When routinely asked how old I was, which is a consistent question when hospitalized, my answers varied as a result of not remembering the truth of my own age. My sticking point, however, was high-school…I know not why, although it certainly was consistent. Identifying with this age would explain why I thought I hadn’t yet attended college…I was 26 at the time & had finished college 4 years prior.
Whilst in the 2nd hospital (as in the 1st hospital, I was largely asleep, amidst my 28 day coma) I didn’t understand why I was there, which is extremely common for Traumatic Brain Injury survivors, I’m told. In truth, at that point in my recovery, I was in a skilled nursing facility. I was sent to this facility, to better my skills enough, for transference to California Pacific Medical Center . There was a check list of actions I needed to be able to complete successfully to show I was ready for transference, which a representative from CPMC came to evaluate (prompted by the insistence of ((via a profuse amount of outreach)) my rock-star healing team). Within this care facility, I enacted spontaneous confabulation as well:
“We’re at war!!”
My in-room neighbor, who had substantial hearing loss & resultantly, had her TV turned all the WAY up. She was viewing the news, within which, the news anchors were discussing war (such a novelty). To substantiate this sound bite which had lodged its way into my brain there was the sound of power washing taking place just outside my window. The concept of war, elicited by a blaring television, meeting LOUD auditory disturbances, that my brain had decided emulated gun shots, just outside my window = war WAS at hand and HERE!!!
Now, let’s return to further rehab, shall we?
Finally, Id completed the check list of items needed to attend California Pacific Medical Center.
While there for a bit, a certified Nursing Assistance was stationed outside my door, due to the reality that I’d *randomly* chosen to get out of my bed — shoot I had things to do & places to go. I wanted to leave & get to them! These thoughts existed alongside my total lack of cognitive awareness…Resultantly, I was identified to be a fall risk
I made sense of this extraneous (seemed to me) attendant by exercising spontaneous confabulation (And this story IS a whopper!). I decided that this attendant was my baby’s personal body guard, because I was pregnant with an NBA players baby.
Obviously.
That figment explained both why I was in the hospital AND why there was a nurse stationed outside my door.
My baby en-utero needed protection!