The 400Lb Gorilla

DC Farmer

Closed head trauma is about as much fun as nude paint-balling. There is nothing remotely enjoyable about your brain being bounced around inside your skull like a Ping-Pong ball in a goldfish bowl. And since normal grey matter has the consistency of a chilled egg pudding, the outcome is seldom beneficial. Damage can range from a very nasty headache to a lifelong impression of a drooling cauliflower. With luck, it’s possible to recover with nothing more than a touch of memory loss, which in itself may not always be such a bad thing. After all, sometimes it’s a blessing not to remember every detail of the day your life gets thrown into a blender.

Matt Danmor was a blender survivor.

Because he couldn’t remember the few moments leading up to the accident, they’d diagnosed a smidgen of retrograde amnesia. And since the details of what happened after the car left the road were pretty sketchy, too, they slapped on the label of post-traumatic memory loss for no extra charge.

In truth, it was all a bit of a blur. Matt’s recovery was slow and inconsistent. Even months afterwards, as his bruised mind repaired itself, so that the picture became less like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle and more like a stuttering magic lantern show, certain stark recollections would return with a vengeance to wake him sweating, pulse pounding, in the dark watches of the night. Sensations like the juddering thump of the car turning over twice, or the sharp metallic odour of petrol soaking slowly into his trousers, or the sickly rose bouquet of the air freshener leaching all over his upside-down forehead, or the pitiful relief he’d felt when the fireman wielding the Jaws of Life finally cut through the screeching metal to grab Matt before he passed out.

He’d regained consciousness at the hospital. There, the thing that stood out like a Klingon in a bikini, the one abiding memory he had of those first couple of hours as they tried to work out which parts of him weren’t broken, was his MRI scan.

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