My nightmare year with brain injury began in late September 2006 when I fell down the steep, twisty, windy steps in my 100-year-old home.

Little did I know when I consulted my family doctor complaining of vertigo that the "cure" -- Antivert -- would lead to something else entirely. In the next few days my loss of balance caused me to fall in the parking lot at work. A week later, I fell down the stairs and, fearful of some kind of damage, called in sick to work.

Things seemed OK. But one evening later that week, I was either going up to bed or descending from the second floor (I don’t really remember which) when I fell downstairs and landed on the hard floor below. My poor husband and son, hearing a bang, came down to find me lying, unresponsive.

First I was taken to a hospital where my doctor had admitting privileges. However, oops, the hospital had no trauma surgeon on staff. Then the ambulance was directed to a hospital across the county some 20 miles away that specialized in brain injuries.

(Later, I was reliably told that the delay in getting me treatment extended my recovery. I suppose a surgeon needed to be handy just in case, but as it turned out, I never had surgery.)

I arrived in a light coma, with some broken bones in my head, in my occipital cavity. I was mostly unaware of my surroundings in the ICU where I stayed for 10 days. I remember vivid dreams, profound loneliness and fear. I know that I did have visits from my husband and my frightened 14-year-old son, but I mostly felt terror and a strong desire to go home.

One night I dreamed that the nursing assistants were holding me captive. In fact, I think I was in restraints then, because one of them told me the next morning that I was making her life miserable by not staying in bed.

I dreamed I was taken to a farm in Burlington County where the attendants were setting out lines of cocaine and urging me to take some. I couldn’t believe it. Finally I tried to run away to the area of the Tacony-Palmyra bridge so I could make my way home on Route 73, which goes directly (albeit distantly) to Conshohocken.

Another time, I dreamed that my husband had decided to "kidnap" me from the hospital, bed and all, and take me to a show in Atlantic City.

A little reassurance would have helped a lot, but at this hospital, no one offered it.

And oh yes, there were the screamers. One therapist told me later that this was typical after a brain injury, and anyway, ya didn't want to sedate someone to within an inch of his or her life at this particular time -- especially if one was looking for a patient to recover brain function in time. This added to the terror. Once or twice I begged a nurse to move me so I need not hear this, and she did.

After a couple of weeks, I was sent to the affiliated rehab hospital for physical, occupational, and, for a while, speech therapy.

At first, occupational therapy consisted of someone’s waking me up at 6:30 or 6:45 a.m. (the crack of dawn for someone like me who had worked evenings for morning newspapers during most of 35 years) to take me to the shower, where a chair waited for me to sit down while I got clean.

Then I returned to my room to get dressed for breakfast, which was served just down the hall. Someone took me there in a wheelchair.

One of the few positives at the hospital was good food. I almost couldn’t believe how good.

Then someone would come to bear me to my next therapy session — I remember one instance when someone came to my room to tell me that she had been scheduled to see me but wouldn’t that day for reasons I don’t remember.

Physical therapy was the hardest. Considering that before my accident I had walked all my life since I was 1, it was extraordinarily difficult. They ran me through 15 to 20 minutes on the treadmill each time, and other stuff that an inactive person like me found unpleasant. I hardly ever wanted so much as to walk my late dog.

Balance was an issue, and has continued to be. My inpatient therapist, whose father was an ophthalmologist and who knew something about eyes, spotted that my right eye moved in a kind of nystagmus-like way when I lay down. This, she thought, would explain the vertigo.

In other words, I had a condition known as Benign Positional Paroxysmal Vertigo. It supposedly occurs when crystals in the fluid of the inner ear are knocked out of place.

There was a treatment for it, however. Hee hee hee. Carolyn took me to a cheerful Chinese doctor who treated the BPPV by hanging me upside down on the examining table. It pretty much did the trick, though I ended up having several more treatments for the BPPV.

And there was a truly satanic device called the Balance Master, wherein therapists chained you in so you couldn’t fall but then caused the machine to rock in such a way that you were sure you were going to topple backward.