Soaked Through
I made it back to the hotel room with my underwear completely soaked through from sweat. Not a light dampness—full saturation. My armpits were a mess, my arms glistened, and sweat kept dripping into my eyes no matter how many times I wiped it away. The heat here doesn’t mess around, and neither does a brain that can no longer regulate temperature the way it used to. Heat intolerance is a common and frustrating part of TBI recovery—the injury can disrupt the body’s thermostat, so the same temperature that other people shrug off leaves you overheating faster, draining faster, and dealing with heavier headaches and fatigue. It’s a brutal combination.
It was only 10 a.m. The event had already been too much. My headache was pounding, the kind that makes everything feel louder and sharper than it should. Overwhelming doesn’t cover it. I peeled off the wet clothes, got in the shower, dried off and then just laid down. Eyes closed. Trying to get even a little rest.
That’s the thing about heat and this injury: when your body can’t regulate, you don’t get to keep wearing what’s already soaked. You have to take it off and start fresh. The same need is true of me with my sisters and those we lost after the injury. Their decisions created a kind of relational heat—no regulation, no adjustment, just rising temperature—and my brain injury left me without the usual ways to cool things down or keep the old patterns from clinging. At some point you have to peel off the wet underwear of what used to be and begin again, clean. And to be ready to do it again if the heat returns.
When I woke up there was a message from her.
That’s when it hit me: the night before, I had talked about this project. For a second pure panic set in—had I said too much? Said something that made any of this findable? Thankfully I hadn’t. Nothing concrete enough to track. Still, that jolt of fear was real. Fear that if she knew, she’d misread one line the way she apparently misread a couple of lines in letters over the past years, and decide to reject me again. It hit me hard: if this doesn’t work out this time, it will be final. She already almost did.
Living with this brain injury has been a living hell. There’s no soft way to put it. The fatigue, the headaches, the way ordinary days can suddenly become too much—it’s constant work just to stay functional, even partially functional enough to show up for two hours this morning. And yet I’d take every difficult part of it, and every degree of this heat, if it means having her in my life again. Losing family hurt more than any headache. Losing the chance to see her each day—even in a picture—to hear her throughout the week, to know her accomplishments, her joys, her sorrows. Losing her. Losing my other sister, my parents, my other siblings. But especially losing the ones who were there every day before. The ones who were really there and used to allow me to be there too.
I already talked to my wife about moving here and the other problems it solves in addition to this one. She was on board. Now I just need to line up a job. That’s the hard part, but it’s on me to figure it out—for my wife and for my sister. Coming here has been the only thing that has worked in three years of trying everything. If it can give my wife and me what we need by having family again, we have to try. Even though it’s been just small conversations so far, it’s already been more in three days than in three years combined. I can’t lose that again—no matter how many times the heat comes back. My wife and I love her very much
