In 2021, I had been living in Spain for more than 4 years, where I moved to be with my partner. Every summer we traveled to the US to spend time with my family. During COVID (2020) we stayed in Spain but in 2021 we had to go again. And I was really looking forward to it!

My sister had gotten married a few months earlier and some close guests couldn’t attend, so another sister and I threw a party to celebrate the wedding at my parents’ house. I was going to arrive a day or two early to help.

I did the COVID tests before leaving the country because I was not yet vaccinated…the plan was to get vaccinated in the US, since it coincided with the weeks when people my age could be vaccinated in Spain. And we were already planning a move to Almería after the holidays – a new job for my husband and a new area to explore for me.

The trip started normally until Dallas, where almost all flights were canceled due to lack of staff on the airlines. I have never seen so many people cry in an airport before. Families going on vacation, a man who had taken out a loan to go to a relative’s funeral… When I had to speak with an American Airlines representative, he told me that I was going to have to wait 4 days in Dallas and that they would not pay me the stay. This was the first moment of foreshadowing…

I arrived home during the last hours of my sister’s wedding party. It was disappointing…she had missed her wedding because of COVID and now the party too. Second omen…

My jetlag didn’t go away until July 6th. I went to bed at about the right time the night before. By the morning of the 6th, I was feeling fine. I was finally going to get my COVID vaccine and be able to travel freely again, without all the hassle and fuss.

I had breakfast and went to my parents’ house. Also that summer, my sisters and I had planned to talk about how to take care of our parents as they aged. So that house was where most of my nephews and sisters were together with my mother with dementia and my father who was just going slower than before. We were all happy to be together, joking about family, home, and more.

I had an appointment to get my vaccine at the historic pharmacy in town. It’s a pharmacy that still had the black and white square tile floor, with a counter that served sodas with flavors from the 1950s and where they sold gifts, medicine, witty signs, and more. When it was my turn to go downtown to get vaccinated at the pharmacy, 4 of my nieces opted to come with me to be at the pharmacy and look at things. We walked together – it’s less than a mile from the house to the pharmacy. My father had offered to go with us but I told him not to worry, it would be a one-way trip.

I sat in the waiting chair and the woman in the vaccination section of the pharmacy asked me which vaccine I had chosen to get. In Spain, two of my students were people intimately involved in the region’s vaccine rollout and they told me it didn’t matter which vaccine I got, as long as I got one. So, being in the US for such a short time, I had decided to get the J&J (Jenssen in Spain) – it was a single dose and after that day I was going to be able to live normally. So I told her, “Johnson and Johnson.”

She looked at me and handed me some paperwork to fill out. She knew my father and from my face, I think she guessed I was the daughter who lived in Spain. She said, “Did you know that J&J was illegal here for a few months, but they’ve already allowed it again?” “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.” “Yes, they said it’s more dangerous for women between 19 and 45.” I realized I fell into this bracket of the population. “Oh,” I said, and thought about the advice I’d received in Spain, and what are the odds? “No big deal,” I said, “I’ll get it.”

Another woman also waiting for her vaccine told me, “My friend got it and said she just felt some flutters in her heart, but otherwise she felt fine.” This comforted me, and I thanked her and went back to get the vaccine. She gave it to me, telling me I should sit at the tables by the bar and wait about 15 minutes.

I went to the table – the nieces admiring stuffed animals – and felt the palpitations. It was like a pressure line from the vaccination site up my arm to my heart. I thought about calling one of the nieces, Leonie, to come with me because I wasn’t feeling completely stable. But there were a lot of people there having breakfast and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I took out my cell phone to write a message to my husband (still in Spain, in his first days of a new job), started typing and…

I was coming back to consciousness and the nieces were there, looking at me. I couldn’t feel my hands or forearms. I told them so and Leonie told me to try to move my hands to get the circulation back. I did and little by little it happened. The nurse who had given me the vaccine came running. They were watching me from the counter, including my grandfather’s retired secretary.

In time my father, my sister and finally the emergency medical technicians arrived. I didn’t want to go with them: I was thinking about the costs of a hospital visit and I didn’t know if the Spanish insurance would pay (it did, mostly). In the end, my father encouraged me to go with them.

I felt strange, mostly scared. At the hospital they told me that nothing was wrong with me and that I would just have to wait two days for the vaccine.

During that month, I went to the hospital 3 times, with three different diagnoses, and none of them were head trauma. The diagnosis came to me at the end of the month, before I returned to Spain. And I didn’t believe it. Between neurologists, doctors at the hospital and a young doctor, it was the latter who diagnosed me correctly.

But I didn’t believe it. Why?

Because as a child I had fallen down the wooden stairs at home, lost consciousness, and then in theory I was fine.

Because in high school I had my first TBI playing soccer – my eyes went cloudy for a few minutes after a really good header. A few minutes later I was back in the game.

Because in college I had my second and third TBI playing soccer – the same thing happened to me and although I had the feeling that afterwards my ability to find vocabulary, to speak quickly, to memorize diminished, nothing was definitive and nobody at that time knew how to diagnose head traumas if it wasn’t with internal bleeding or something physically probable.

A few months, and then a year later, I was finally convinced that I had TBI – contrary to what the family doctors, the neurologist and the psychiatrist said.

And that’s why I write this blog. I learned most of what I learned through blogs, communities and organizations adjacent to the medical field – and all in English. I want to open a space for those of us who suffer from this. First so that we know that what we suffer from is real, and second to give hope. In the past, this condition was lifelong. But not anymore. It can be improved. Let’s do it together.