Yes, I'm well aware that I had a concussion at the time of my fall, but that injury arrived concurrently with the onset of the PTSD. The concussion can explain a lot of the dizziness, nausea, confusion, and memory problems that I had in the ensuing years (these problems are minimal in scale now), but it cannot explain the terror responses and visceral cycling of old experiences that my body goes through whenever I enter an even mildly similar situation.

The concussion that I had was mild, it was the kind of hit that most neurologists would expect a person to recover from within a week, if not sooner. But I didn't recover within a week, not by a long shot. The reason that recovery didn't take place was the PTSD - when the body goes into a freeze response (that which creates PTSD) during a traumatic event and fails to discharge this freeze, the body becomes a walking time capsule of that traumatic moment in time. When a physical injury comes with the psychological trauma, the physical injury often doesn't heal properly: Broken bones don't set, strained ligaments don't strengthen, and as in my case concussions don't heal over. PTSD is bad enough, but trust me on this one, having Post Concussion Syndrome along with it makes matters significantly worse.

But here's the thing: Every step forward I've had psychologically has, without fail, been coupled with a release of the physical pain in my head and a partial return to the mental clarity that I experienced before all of this took place. The two are inextricably linked: The concussion is the PTSD, and the PTSD is the concussion. It's your classic case of physiology and psychology occupying the same middle ground. That's why I'm so hellbent on getting this PTSD out of my system ENTIRELY, because only then will my body let go of this one moment in time and allow my brain to relax, reform, and get its ducks back in a row. I have incurred no appreciable brain damage as a result of my fall, as such I have no doubt that the capacity to be my former self is still intact.