Last year on July 10th, Bijou Bell hit her head skateboarding home. She woke up the next day to blood covering her pillow, and she doesn’t remember much else.
Perhaps you’ve seen Bijou at the Holland Project, performing in one of her three bands. You might have seen her working at Bad Apple, or skating at Believe Park. Since the accident, Bijou hasn’t been around quite as much. But thanks to some good friends in Reno, and therapy, and lots of positive thinking… she’s getting back into the swing of things.
After Bijou hit her head, the community she had formed in Reno took care of her like a family would. Bijou’s boss and best friend, Francesca, took Bijou to the hospital– where she got staples in her head.
“I couldn’t walk. I still can’t smell and taste,” Bijou says, taking a glance at her pistachio latte with sadness.
Comic art Bijou is now making will be on display at Sizzle Pie on March 19th.
Like many who experience major concussions, Bijou needed several different kinds of therapy in order to start recovering. Physical, cognitive, and speech therapy were all necessary for returning to some level of normalcy. “It was a lot of things,” she shakes her head. “I had to go to the doctor a lot.”
Inevitably, being at the doctor so often comes with a steep mountain of bills. That’s where Reno’s jazz community stepped in. The scene is “very present in each other’s lives,” according to Bijou. Her friend Tim organized a benefit jazz concert at Laughing Planet last year, which helped Bijou immensely in covering her medical costs.
Bijou’s injury also caused her brain to swell, which popped a hole in her eardrum. This made it hard to hear well– not ideal for a musician. Luckily, Bijou had connected with an ear specialist through the Holland Project, another friend named Tim. In the past, Tim had provided Bijou and her friends with ear plugs. After the accident, Tim was able to quickly set Bijou up with an ear appointment.
But the community love didn’t stop there. For about a month after she hit her head, Bijou needed round the clock supervision. Luckily, she has some incredible (and incredibly organized) friends who were up for the task. “They would all text each other, and they had like a huge spreadsheet of all the medications I had to take,” Bijou recalls. “The community aspect of my recovery is literally like- the only reason I’m here.
Bijou has come a long way since last July, but cracking her head open on the Reno pavement has had some lasting effects that she’s still working through. “My memory is not very good anymore,” says Bijou. “It's getting better for real, but there's some things I just don't remember at all. And then when I do remember I get really angry…I feel like my emotions are really hard to understand right now.”
Through journaling, Bijou has been able to piece some thoughts and memories back together.
“I had to literally force myself to write what happened every day, like what I ate and stuff,” she says, her journal next to the pistachio latte- a little portal into her own life. “I feel like I can read through all the stuff that I forgot, and it seems like I understand myself a little bit more. And I'm getting back into myself now that I can see my thoughts over time.”
Despite all the unexpected setbacks of the last eight months, Bijou says that in some ways, she’s grateful that she hit her head. “I definitely was in a really bad depressive state. I feel like it sort of pushed me to realize that people care about me, and I really needed that reminder, I guess. Before… I had all these sort of dreams– like moving to New York, maybe one day,” Bijou remembers.
For a long time she’s also wanted to produce an album of her band’s music. “Then I hit my head. And as soon as I had the go, you know, it's like, okay cool. I’m gonna move to New York on this day. All the opportunities started coming just because I felt like– life's a little short.”
Especially in the beginning of her recovery, it was really difficult for Bijou to play music. But that didn’t stop her from creating. “The only thing I could do was make art for 30 minutes at a time. So I made this little book with all these little knight drawings.” Bijou’s sketches show knights in therapy, watching Shrek, sitting in a room of guitars, and performing other bits and pieces of Bijou’s (and our) lives. “I was like, this is so funny- a knight not wearing a helmet sounds so stupid.”
Bijou’s knights will be on exhibit at Sizzle Pie on March 19th, a Tuesday, from 5-7pm. The drawings reveal a little bit of Bijou’s life since July 10th– and a bit of the community that surrounded her as well.