My grandparents were told that my father had permanent brain damage and would never fully recover. When my father awoke, he had to be retrained from potty-training on up. They assumed this meant that his cognitive function would never be normal, but it was actually his personality that changed.
My father had come down with measles in 1962 at 13 years old, while living in Johannesburg, South Africa. His case developed into encephalitis, and he slipped into a coma. He woke up some two or three weeks later.
By my father’s own description, he could not control his actions when he lost his temper. He had no recollection of having anger issues prior to getting measles.
My father had been incredibly proud of a collection of special rocks he had collected while in South Africa. Shortly after awakening from his coma, he was holding his collection when something triggered him. He forcibly threw the rocks, scattering and breaking many of them in the process. When his anger subsided, he was left looking at his destroyed treasures and genuinely confused about why he had ruined something that was so special to him.
This sort of uncontrolled outburst would plague him the rest of his life, even though he was a very gentle man at all other times.
The only diagnosis he ever got was of long-term brain damage. I don’t think the doctors or his parents realized that the violent outbursts were a result of this. Even though he regained his full cognitive abilities, his parents treated him as if he would never have the same intelligence level as other people his age. For instance, they gave him building blocks as a gift when he turned 16 years old.
Growing Up With My Dad
Due to my father’s brain damage, I grew up never knowing when he would blow up, and what might happen. At least twice, he lost his temper while driving and did u-turns while driving 40 mph. In high school, I had to stop him from bashing his own head into the wall of our apartment. Once I had a partner, my father regularly shattered Christmas decorations because we did not go to my parents’ house.
Eventually, he got to a point where he could somewhat direct his actions, like throwing his car keys into the bushes so that he could not drive off mad. He would stalk off instead and usually be gone for several hours before coming home once the anger passed.
It has taken years of therapy and psychiatric treatment for me to come to terms with the fact that these and other episodes were not the result of deliberate decisions on my father’s part. It was not until I was in therapy that I stumbled across psychological texts that listed the symptoms of prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex damage. They fit perfectly with the changes in behavior that my father described after his coma.
Finding those articles finally let me let go of some of my anger. However, it does not make it any easier to deal with the results.
If there had been a vaccine available when he was a child, I feel certain he would not have gotten the disease. If he hadn’t, my entire childhood would have been different.
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