News from Lake Brain-Be-Gone
My brain broke up with me. I mean broke up in me. Everything fell out of place.
It’s hard to put words into the world right now for many reasons. Like they’re not big enough. Like we live in a moment so on edge and reactive that words can feel dangerous. And in my case, because I was hit by a drunk with a truck. I learned and forgot that a few hundred times.
In my first life, I helped people make things and bake things and style things and solve things. That was called freelance writing. Then I was compacted, me and my glasses and cellphone and mind. There was blood in my mouth. And glass in my skin. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage.
In this life, I spent nine weeks pretending I could comprehend what people were saying. Eight weeks staring into space. Three months pointing to my head. Six months learning how to speak and relearning how to walk. There were other issues, too. Like a bit of aphasia plus a side of I-forget-what. Oh, right, a side of amnesia. This was called a TBI (traumatic brain injury). I was told this, but couldn’t remember hearing it for a few months, and couldn’t say it for a few years.
Letters clumped into words and words lumped into thoughts if they stayed long enough to clump or lump. I would try to remember the month, the year, and the season we’re in. Sometimes I could. Sometimes I couldn’t. My eyes blurred. My mind blurred. Like I had come to the wrong place as the wrong person. I had.
Einstein said failure is success in progress. You learn something. Then you forget it, and learn it again. Testers checked my mental status, cranial nerves, reflexes, sensory system, coordination, gait. Plus, if I bumped into more things on my left or my right. Some brain testing occurred while testers zapped me with electric current. The point was to see if I would focus on the zaps, which meant focusing on pain, or on something else. If you were focused on daffodils, for example, you would feel the amount of pain minus the focus on daffodils. Or something like that.
For the time insurance allowed, which was a few weeks, I saw someone called a Cognitive Therapist. She asked me to point to a teapot, an apple, a plate, a spoon. This was called “confrontational naming.” No, really, it was. One report said my cognition had suffered “systemic collapse.” Some of what I tried to say dissolved as I was trying to say it. That is called “semantic drift.” Same with stuff I saw or heard. Stuff dissolved as I saw or heard it.
My new brain default was “fried.” Which feels like you’re beside yourself. Your first self beside the self you are now. For a while, I would look at my own hands and not know what to do with them. I couldn’t remember how to put them on a keyboard and I especially couldn’t remember how to make uppercase letters. Plus I couldn’t feel where my fingers were.
The doctor in charge of assessing my cognition said I’d acquired “diffuse damage in multiple parts of the brain” and the “single broadest cognitive gap” she had ever seen. That meant I went from pretty smart to extremely not-smart every few minutes of every day. Years later, I learned that my injury—a “a coup contrecoup with diffuse axonal shearing of the brain”—was the same type of injury former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head.
Speaking of former, one day at my former home, the barn blew to bits when lightning hit a nearby cedar tree. There was nothing left to salvage, just splintered barn wood strewn over three acres of woods. You might ask if I heard the barn blowing to bits. I don’t know. I may have heard a big bang, but somehow didn’t notice it or couldn’t comprehend what it might mean.
In any case, I didn’t check the barn until the next day when I noticed briefly, then forgot again. I don’t and didn’t know what was in the barn before it vaporized. I was in a daze for weeks, then months, then years. And the cedar tree that stood beside the barn for 200 years? It threw itself at the lighting and burned with the barn.
Which brings me back to the brain. I relearned how to see, how to hear, how to walk, how to talk, how to deploy a Kleenex, how to operate a fork. Then I forgot and learned again. When I tried to read, words broke apart, so lemonade looked like “edanomel” and giraffe looked like “effearig” and brain trauma looked like “amuart niarb.” It takes decades to build a life, and seconds to destroy it. Sort of like the barn.
Breaking your head in real life is not like breaking your head in Hollywood. My TBI wasn’t like Lindsay Lohan’s in the Netflix film, Falling for Christmas (2022), which starred Lindsay Lohan as a spoiled heiress who bonks her head in a ski accident. The fall, which would have been fatal to anyone else, brings Lohan the cozy care of a hunky guy just in time for Christmas.
I live alone. Sometimes I say hello to a Christmas cactus or a rabbit-foot fern, and say, “Hey, Fern, You’re doing a great job being a fern” or “Hey, Christmas Cactus, you’re doing a great job, too.” Speaking of jobs, at Christmas, Santa has 31 hours to travel 75-1/2 million miles. Conventional reindeer top out at 15 miles per hour (as opposed to 650 miles per second).
Assuming each child he visits receives just one gift—say, a medium-sized Lego set which weighs two pounds—the sleigh is carrying gifts that weigh 321,300 tons. If each child receives two gifts, it would be 642,600 tons, not including the weight of the sleigh. Which would require not the fabled eight or nine but a few hundred thousand reindeer.
These numbers are based on Santa delivering gifts to Christian kids only, which I hope is not the case. If he delivers to Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or Jain or Sikh or other kids, too, the numbers would be way bigger and the world would be kinder, too. FYI, 19 years post-truck, I’m still a few reindeer short of a sleigh.
Note:
*Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is seen by the insurance industry and many health care providers as an “event.” Once treated and provided with a brief period of rehabilitation, the perception exists that patients with a TBI require little further treatment and face no lasting effects on the central nervous system or other organ systems.
*In fact, a TBI is not an event or an outcome. It is a chronic disease process, one that fits the World Health Organization definition as having one or more of the following characteristics: it is permanent, caused by non-reversible pathological alterations, requires special training of the patient for rehabilitation, and/or may require a long period of observation, supervision, or care.
*TBI increases long-term mortality and reduces life expectancy. Although rarely, if ever, seen this way, TBI is the beginning of an ongoing, perhaps lifelong process that impacts multiple organ systems.
*Traumatic brain injuries occur every nine seconds, which is three times more often than heart attacks or strokes.
*There are one billion disabled people in the world, which makes us the single largest minority on the planet and likely, the least able to publish anything anywhere. It’s also the only minority anyone can join at any time.
Pre-truck, Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for clients like New York, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Post-truck (after a long pause), her work has appeared on NBC News online, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and Oldster. She has been nominated twice for both Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. You can find her Substack, Dispatch from Bewilderness, at judithhannahweiss.substack.com
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Gorgeous and terrible. Thank goodness your words have come back, so you can share them with us.
There was a famous neurologist who did studies on brain aphasia, especially the right hemisphere and he met a man who could not recognize pictures as a whole. This man saw his own foot but couldn't recognize it as such. He once picked up his hat only to realize it was his wife's head. He survived his daily routines by humming songs the full day. When the humming stopped, it was like his brain shut down. I think such diseases or accidents tell us more about how brain functions than any "normal" and functioning brain.