My Brain Injury Details: Occipital Lobe

All brain injuries are different. It's the brain, it controls everything, so anything can be affected.

My brain injury is from a vehicular collision. It was moved front and back in my skull, damaging my right frontal lobe and my occipital lobe. The occipital lobe is at the the back of your head. It controls visual information. So it makes perfect sense that I was seeing double for a few months, while my brain was creating new pathways.

There was a time, after my first neuro-psychological assessment, that I was worried that I couldn't accurately recognize colours anymore.
            I love painting!
I have gotten pretty skilled at seeing a colour, and being able to see how much of which colours make it. I was worried I could no longer do that. Especially when the brain specialist was telling my family and I, the results of that two-day long assessment.
<sigh> Seriously, two days!
He said I did poorly on a colour test.
Bummed, I later discovered it was the test that, for example, the word blue would be coloured red, or green, or yellow, and I would either have to read the word, or say the colour I was seeing, can't recall now. . .
So not at all what I first thought(Hooray!), and I just had to practice to relearn my painting skills. Like everything else! Practice.
Isn't the brain cool?!

Seeing double was terrible!
It had an affect on everything! My vision also got a lot worse with the injury. I had to get a new prescription for my glasses, and I saw an opthamologist for my double-vision. Amazingly, I was given these little plastic film pieces to be placed on the lenses of my glasses. These were called 'prisms'. They broke up the light differently, so my brain could better interpret what I was seeing, singularly. It was pretty amazing!
Before I got the prisms though, riding in the car was the worst. For whatever reason, objects further away were worse for being...straight up double! I would just look around inside the car. This also helped with my anxiety and vehicles.

I wore the prisms for the next few months, and in April 2010, I took them off, and I've been golden ever
since!

I saw the opthamologist again, and he told me my brain was all healed!
I told him that it's a bit more complicated than that. ;)
I go again in the new year, to see if anything has changed.