On Dec 18, 2009, I was riding my bicycle with a group and we were coming off of a bicycle trail into a parking lot so we were only going about 5 mph or so. On person told me that my front wheel speedo pickup was clicking so I reached down to pull it slightly away from the magnet. My carbon fiber fork exploded into pieces and since I was so close to the ground I didn’t have any time to roll way from my fall and struck with my complete weight on my brow ridge. To make a long story short — the hospital released me within hours since the x-rays showed no broken skull. But I had about as severe a concussion as you can get. I had absolutely no short term memory meaning that there was nothing to move into long term memory. I started developing seizures which would erase more memories. My doctor thought that he was competent in handling whatever I had. He wasn’t. The Neurologists he sent me to made him look like Salk. Everyone knew there was something wrong with me since I could barely find my way home even when I wasn’t having seizures. I wasn’t even remembering to eat and lost almost HALF of my weight. One brother didn’t know what to do and the other simply told everyone I had gone crazy. Finally my best friend, a Federal Investigator, stepped in. He took me to a higher end hospital who could find no signs of cancer since that was all it could be with such a marked weight loss. They suggested a Professor of Neurology at Stanford who kept a small practice. He tested me and said that I was obviously severely concussed. But he was loath to take my case since I had been seeing a neurologist that he had gone through school with. He gave the made a call and came back shaking his head. He said that something had happened to that man and he didn’t appear to know the first thing about concussions. So he took my case and prescribed a medication that I could afford. I sort of “came to” from this and became aware of my surroundings. Or more likely I stopped losing my short term memory in between seizures. I had the sort of seizures that erased memory of them occurring so it wasn’t as if I could tell the doctor that there was still problems. But my brother saw me having them and told the doctor and he added another medication (which is pretty expensive). This caused an instant return to normal save for large blocks of memory missing. Then the doctor had to try and set the dosage to the point where it worked without killing me. The side effects are dizziness of a weird sort. I can still ride my bicycle fine. But I can’t walk a straight line. While I don’t have many memories my intellectual capacity isn’t affected. And the cost of the medication is almost $200 a mth. Since slowly recovering normal activity over the last 4 years I have had the misfortune to have interactions with the medical profession and discover that too many of them are completely incompetent. So if you have ANY questions about any medical problems you are having that cannot be instantly diagnosed by your doctor please do not hesitate to get as many opinions as necessary to get it diagnosed properly.