3. Injuries

This section may have some bad medical terminology due to my inability to afford care during much of the ensuing time since the incident. Following the assault, I was employed for all of 6 business days before being fired as I was unable to fulfill my job duties in very obvious ways. This was just after earlier in the month earning exemplary reviews from my management and co-workers. With no income, an inability to work, and having recently burnt through my savings to establish the company, insurance and proper medical care were out of the question. Note that I'll primarily cover the physical effects and the immediate impact it had on my life here, and I'll cover the concussion effects and its long term recovery in the next section.

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The primary physical impairment has been to the vision from my left eye where I was initially struck. It caused a detachment of the vitreous gel behind the eye which caused me to see what are commonly referred to as eye "floaters" constantly. This may sound minor, but my left eye is now so dense with these distractions that I will, at almost all times, see something crawling on a wall or a nearby surface that isn't really there. This has been troubling as it's very hard to turn this part of your brain's instincts off and not react to something you perceive as a small bug crawling nearby or even on yourself.

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My left eye now also has a fairly constant blind spot in the direct center of its vision. It gets worse and better at times, though I have yet to identify the pattern or conditions of its behavior. When it's at its worst it's the equivalent of holding a quarter maybe a foot in front of your vision and you are then unable to see anything within that area. This can especially impact reading and I can tell from people's facial expressions when I talk to them that they notice I'm having a hard time focusing on them.

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I had a small black eye for the usual amount of time you'd expect to have a black eye. I also had a large bruise on my lower back from where he had shoved me back. There was a small shelf just next to the window which I must have been thrown against. Thankfully it missed by spine by about an inch so there weren't any major impacts from that beyond being generally sore for some time.

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To touch on the general mental impacts, I was everything you would expect out of someone that had been concussed. I could be in the middle of doing something and experience a "reset", where I suddenly had no idea what I had been doing. I had trouble focusing and trouble remembering both long term facts or recent information. I was unable to continue exercising, despite the fact that this was a period of my life where I spent no less than 15 hours in the gym every week. When I even tried to walk around the neighborhood to get the lightest of cardio in, I would begin to feel a sharp pain and general pressure build within my skull. That wasn't anything that I was looking to test, so I suddenly became very sedentary and inactive.

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This of course lead to various bouts with depression and stalled the growth of my company entirely. I went from being an endlessly motivated individual living what can only be described as the American Dream to someone just barely clinging on as the days went by. My entire business plan had hinged on me having a specific set of skills and being able to do a certain amount of work every day to advance through the first year. With that gone, I was just some random guy trying to make good on someone else's plans.