Author

My Book

Book cover of 'no such thing' by Lynne Melcombe, detailing a true story of mild traumatic brain injury and recovery.

Excerpts from my book No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and my 20-Year (so far) Recovery, to be published by Iguana Books in June 2026, which is Brain Injury Awareness Month in Canada.

From Chapter 3: 1 Week Out

The Hotel Vancouver is a historic landmark, the last luxury hotel on the original Canadian Pacific Railway line. The tile floors are polished to a high sheen, the staff are as crisp and efficient as their uniforms, and the dimly lit piano bar serves great martinis. But on December 3, a week to the day after my fall, I’m not up to a drink or music. I’m there to meet with the employer in charge of the three contracts I’ve had to cancel, who is in Vancouver on other business. At the time, his company is my largest source of income, and I still believe I’ll be better in a few days, so it seems wise to accept his invitation. I take a cab from Port Moody to downtown Vancouver.

We sit in a quiet conversation area off to one side of the lobby. I’ve rested for the whole day, hoping my headache will remain at bay and I’ll be able to listen intelligently. My pain eases as I relax into casual conversation, and by the end of the meeting it’s receded enough that when he asks me to accompany him to a second and possibly a third meeting that evening, I agree.

We take a cab from the hotel to a house in Vancouver’s posh Point Grey area, where the client welcomes us into her home. Her furnishings have a sleek Scandinavian look, several cuts above IKEA. The décor is all neutral tones: off white and light tan with dark brown and black accents. The view out the massive back window on the main floor is enviable: twinkling city lights outline English Bay and the Burrard Street Bridge as it traverses False Creek from Kitsilano to the West End. Up on Grouse Mountain the floodlights illuminating the main ski run hang in the night sky above the city like a constellation.

The client is warm, and the conversation appears lively—but I can’t follow it. I know they’re speaking English the same way I can identify several languages by their sound and a few words, but I have no idea what they’re saying. The pressure in my head started up again in the cab, and as I try to focus my attention the vise-like feeling intensifies. As minutes tick painfully by, I realize I can no longer pick out even occasional words. When my boss and I step out the door and he asks if I’m ready for the next meeting, I feel incredulous. My pain is so bad I think it must be visible—blood should be trickling out of my eyes and ears or seeping through my pores. Politely declining his invitation, I spend an agonizing hour in a cab back to Port Moody.

From Chapter 3: 3 Weeks Out

I used to love Christmas shopping. I enjoyed taking my time and finding just the right gift for everyone. As the kids have grown older, it’s become harder to find things within our budget for them. At some point, my husband pointed out that if we left shopping until just before Christmas, those big-ticket items would be on sale; things we couldn’t afford in November become manageable by mid-December.

On December 20, we go shopping. We have a list. We know what we want for each person, and I know where we’re most likely to find it. We go into a store, find the item, and then my husband stands in line to pay while I make my way slowly out of the store and look for a place to sit down. When he emerges, he helps me up and I hold his arm for balance as we walk slowly to the next store.

The first day out, I manage a couple of hours of shopping. The second day, it’s ninety minutes. The third day, an hour. By December 24, with time running out, he says he’ll have to finish shopping without me.

“I’m sorry, Lynne. I know you love Christmas shopping.”

“It’s okay.”

“If it weren’t Christmas Eve—”

“I know. We’re out of time.”

I stay home with our seven-year-old and make the best of it. I don’t turn on my computer all day. We wrap gifts, fussing over the best paper for each person, picking the right colour of tissue paper to stuff gift bags, tying everything up with beautiful ribbons and handmade bows. Then we settle in on the twin recliners in the family room to watch a movie. For the first time since the accident, I feel good all day.

I feel good on Christmas Day too. I enjoy opening gifts with the family, cleaning up the mess afterward, and making our traditional Christmas breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup, sausages, and bacon. Mid-afternoon, my sister arrives with her three children, three foster children, and three-year-old grandson. After another round of gift-giving, it’s time to get ready for dinner at the home of another friend. For years, we’ve had large, loud holiday dinners, including fifteen to twenty people from three families and sometimes an extra friend or two. We take turns hosting, with the host family buying and cooking a twenty-five-pound turkey and the others supplying everything else.

This year, dinner is at the home of friends, and it’s my sister’s turn to bring potatoes and vegetables. She arrives at our house with all the vegetables and potatoes in bags, looking for help with the cutting and chopping. Even with all the adults pitching in, it takes two hours. We haven’t been working for long when I begin to feel the familiar tingling at my temples, the pressure starting at the crown of my head and spreading downward, a hat band tightening like a vise, the burning in my neck and right arm. I don’t say anything. I make it through dinner at our friends’ home, but by the time the desserts come out I have to retreat to the couch with a heating pad to my head.

This scene will repeat itself at every family dinner for years. A decade later, I will give up on them. We will start having smaller dinners at home with just immediate family. Two decades later, after the divorce, my children will be the ones hosting family dinners. I will attend, but I will always leave early.

An activity that was perfectly normal before the injury, events I fully enjoyed, will never be normal again.

From Chapter 9: 18 Months Out

Around that time, my family life begins falling apart. It starts with one of my younger daughter’s school field trips. One of many reasons I’ve chosen self-employment is the flexibility it gives me to be involved in my children’s lives. When my older kids were in elementary school and now with my youngest, I often volunteer as a parent chaperone or driver on field trips.

In June 2005 I want to accompany my youngest daughter on her year-end class trip to the water slides near Hope, BC, but I can’t imagine myself coping with the noise and driving involved in accompanying a busload of excited nine-year-olds on a full-day outing, much less enduring the neck-snapping jostling of the slides. My son and a friend of his offer to drive the three of us there in the family car. They play in the water slides with my little girl; I’m just there. It’s not great, but it’s the best I can do. The day goes well enough, but I arrive home with a headache that persists for four days. I can do little but lie in a dark, quiet room and wait for it to pass, wondering how I’ll explain missed deadlines to clients this time.

More school field trips will be out of the question. I feel like I’m letting my daughter down. My husband, who works in an inner-city elementary school, tells me to stop beating myself up. “She’s well taken care of. Plenty of parents work full time and don’t have the opportunity to go on field trips with their kids. This is not going to damage her for life.”

“We used to be so close. We’re not anymore, and I don’t know how to fix that without taking time off work.”

“How can we afford that?” he asks. I have no answer. Conversation over.

In the years that follow, I feel the distance between her and me growing. She no longer confides in me; she goes to her father or her siblings. I miss her. After the lawsuit ends, I try to do fun activities with her, to intervene on her behalf when things in her life go awry, and sometimes to reassert myself as a person of authority in her life. Most of my efforts only seem to increase the distance between us.

Many years later, she shares with me how much pain my sudden disappearance from an active role in her life caused her. Given how hard it is for adults to understand brain trauma, it’s no surprise that, as a seven-year-old, she doesn’t understand what’s happening. All she knows is that I used to wake her in the morning by holding her in my arms and singing “You are my sunshine,” and then one day I stopped. It’s like I vanished. I’m there physically but I’m not “there” at all.

From Chapter 13: 3.5 Years Out

The mediation takes place in an office building in downtown Vancouver. I wear navy-blue dress pants and a waist-length navy-blue cardigan—or is it grey pants and a knee-length grey cardigan? Regardless, they are consignment-store finds, as usual, with the sweater (either one of them) just a tad too large in the shoulders. We sit at a conference table that could accommodate up to a dozen people. There is a smaller, separate room where my husband waits and reads his book and to which Anu and I retreat for breaks. LB, her law student, and the in-house counsel for the insurance company, who has taken the ferry over from Victoria for the day, take their breaks in our main meeting room.

I don’t remember the name of the insurance company’s in-house lawyer, only that Anu has told me she has a reputation for playing hardball, which she relies on for credibility in her professional world. She is slim, has short hair, and wears a hearing aid. LB sits in the middle on the opposite side of the table, her student on her left and the in-house lawyer on her right. Anu sits to my right and the mediator, a tall, solid man in his fifties dressed in a sport jacket and casual shirt, sits at the head of the table with a wall-to-wall window behind him.

It’s a drizzly March morning. The mediator introduces himself and outlines why we’re here. Anu presents the facts of our case. LB gives the defense’s response. I don’t remember much more than that.

Around noon, we break for lunch. A sumptuous buffet has been catered in—bread rolls and croissants, deli meats and cheeses, crudités with dips, chunks of fresh tropical fruits. It’s far more than eight people (including my husband) can eat. I wonder who is paying for it and what will happen with the leftovers.

After lunch, on my way back from the ladies’ room, I walk past the open door to the conference room. A burst of laughter draws my attention, and I glance in. The three lawyers are sitting in their chairs, chatting and laughing. Catching my glance, LB speaks to me warmly.

“Did you want to join us?” she asks. “We’re just comparing the gargoyles on the building across the street to men we know.”

“No. Thanks.” She wants me to let my guard down. Crikey. Can’t she even take a lunch break?

From Afterthoughts: 23 Years Out

My neurologist, Dr. GR, was one of the people who believed me from the start when I told him about my pain. He keeps a file on his computer of different people in different places across the centuries who have reported similar symptoms after a hard hit to the head. Detractors write off such reports as coincidence—or worse, that the mTBI sufferers those reports track were malingering. One of the claims I’ve heard most often is that it simply doesn’t make sense that suddenly, after millennia of evolution, humans are suffering from an epidemic of injuries we’ve never suffered from before.

But it doesn’t take much thinking to realize that the world we inhabit today is entirely different than it was even a century ago. A century ago, most lifestyles still entailed a good deal of physical labour, so most humans had strong backs and necks to provide some protection against such injuries. Even when people were injured, the jobs they returned to were less likely than they are now to involve sitting at a desk, doing close visual work, and reading off a computer screen, all of which are known to cause their own injuries to the neck and the vision system as well as to exacerbate injuries acquired in other ways.

Most jobs today, from retail sales to farming, demand a level of social and intellectual skills they didn’t require a century ago, not to mention technological capacity most of us could not imagine as recently as my first job in retail at the age of sixteen. In this era, whether mild traumatic brain injuries are happening more frequently or are just reported more often and taken more seriously is not the point; the point is that if I had lived a century earlier and my day consisted of cleaning and baking, I probably would have felt better more quickly precisely because I would have had a stronger body and been putting fewer demands on my brain than in almost any job I could do in this century. And because of all this technology, almost everything we do demands more knowledge and training than ever before and has more consequences if not done to higher standards of quality, timeliness, and cost than ever before.

Against this backdrop, the evolutionary argument doesn’t hold up. Just as the planet didn’t evolve to tolerate the level of carbon our society pumps out in a day, month, or year, humans didn’t evolve for the way most of us, at least in Western culture, now live our lives. Sitting at a desk all day, walking while hunched over cell phones, or sitting in gridlocked traffic for a couple of hours every day is not good for our bodies. So, when are we going to recognize it’s not only our bodies that have not had time to adapt to the stressful, sedentary lives many of us live? Our brains, too, are being taxed in ways that evolution has not had enough time to catch up to.