You may now return to your job.

Well, the follow-up appointment on Friday was fine. I'm free to do whatever, like riding my bike, driving, and going back to work. The latter is going to be rough. You get used to sitting around the house and not really having to do anything after a few weeks. I can't believe it's been over a month (only by a day, but still).

I told my doctor about the smell/taste thing, and he showed me a little plastic model of the brain, pointing out where the cranial nerve that controls my smell is located, and how it's pretty commonly damaged in these types of situations.

He also said that it could take up to a year, maybe two before my sense of smell comes back, if it comes back at all. See, depending on how bad stuff got smashed up at the front of my brain, my sense of smell might never come back. That is pretty crazy. I kinda hope it does. I'll keep you posted.

Back to riding my bike tomorrow, though.

These days are coming to an end. I hope.

With any luck, my involuntary freedom from work will be ending on Friday afternoon, when I go in for my post-concussion follow-up appointment. Today I went in for a follow-up CT Scan, so that my doctor will have something to look at and talk about on Friday. I hope the CT Scan looks as well as I've been feeling for the past two and a half weeks or so.

The loss of smell/taste is still going strong. And I've been told it's definitely more a loss of smell than taste, which makes sense, since I can (mostly) taste things that don't require that you be able to smell them first, like pudding or (non-dairy) ice cream. It's funny, because Heather and I were cooking tonight, and my eyes started to water because we were doing some stuff with onions, but I couldn't smell them at all. At this point, I just eat whatever we make and ask her if it tasted good.

Heather's been telling me since we got home that I had a pretty serious concussion, although I thought I had heard them say mild to moderate. Turns out she was right. I was talking to my mom again this evening, and she's friends with the one neurologist who came in to see me the morning after the accident, and he told her that it was pretty severe. I can't even imagine what would have happened if I hadn't been wearing a helmet. I'd probably still be unconscious or worse. It's really crazy to think about. That whole mortality thing.

Which makes you think about everything else. For example, my job is okay. I like my coworkers, but the work itself doesn't get me all excited or anything. Is that something I should be worried about? Or should I just continue to treat it as just my job and make sure that I'm happy with the way things are going when I'm not in the office.

Switching into something that I really like (graphic design) would be a huge financial setback right now. I don't think we could afford it. But of course, the longer I keep doing what I'm doing and keep getting annual increases, the farther away I get from a starting salary in something like design. I guess I should be trying to get more in the way of freelance. Maybe it's time to start trying to get back in touch with former teachers from AIP.

The other thing I've been thinking about lately is all of the stuff I have. Like all of the CDs that I have. I mean, I look at some of them and I couldn't tell you the first thing about what they sound like. I have absolutely no idea. And I just wish I didn't have all of them. I'm sort of working on that, wherein I'm trying to put up a bunch of stuff on eBay, but that's slow and it's a pain, and people aren't buying stuff.

It's just amazing how much stuff I have that holds no meaning for me, and in the case of the music, it's to the point where it's basically like too much. I don't see how I could ever get around to giving some of these albums the attention they'd require to be able to form any sort of judgment about them. How ridiculous is that? It's just stupid. Argh.

Oh well.