I've been keeping a secret, part two

from Brain Damaged News

painting and collage by Judith Hannah Weiss

My name is J. I used to have a name with more letters, but that was before the truck. They test my head hundreds of times and find lots of things have disappeared. Like the file that encodes new memories and the file that integrates physical movements so you don’t fall out of your chair. 

The things that could comfort me, that had comforted me before – the things I loved, you know, books, poems, photographs, pillows, throws, the kitchen sink –  take all this away and you might as well start life as some other person.  I did.

Lesions in the brain can get irritated; this causes outbursts of “excess electrical activity.” That’s a sort of a polite way of saying you may be doing something you don't want to do. Or something you don’t know you’re doing. Or something testers don’t want you to do. I am asked to recall a sequence of two things moments after I see it.  I can’t.  Then a “sequence” of one.  I can’t.

Humans are meaning-making creatures. Trucks are meaning-breaking creatures. The angel returns.  Greener, cleaner people are less likely to cause I forget what.  This is not a drill. A guy in green scrubs puts more of something in the IV. 

Amnesia can take anything and make it disappear.  You can’t remember events before the injury, like the day your child took her first steps or said her first words. And you can’t form new memories, like how to get to the bathroom and back.   Aphasia does the same thing to words – makes them disappear.

It’s like you’re going along trying to put one word in front of the other when the engine fails and the wheels fall off.  You can’t say surprised. You can’t say uplifted. You can’t say inspired. You can’t say lost.  

You can’t say rose or tree or bird.  Things you can’t say remind you of other things you can’t say. That’s how it feels to live with aphasia. Then imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them.  That’s also how it feels.

The human brain weighs three pounds and has billions of cells and millions of “wires” that let you breathe, think, talk, walk, chop, spin salad greens, spice a mean sauce, sell Girl Scout cookies, take care of your mom, keep clients happy, and clean dryer lint. Or not.

Imagine two groups of people on any subject. One is the group of experts who know it backward and forward. The other is the group that “doesn’t know it at all.” They’re the same people, only they’re brain-damaged now.

“Survivors” take endless batteries of tests – not to measure what was lost, but to measure what’s still there.  Tests are said to quantify your cognition.  I’m the only survivor who’s a caregiver, too. I take care of me.

There are other problems, too. Like sometimes I can’t read, or at least can’t read well. For instance, I see the Moon has significant deposits of water locked in grains of rice. That could be great. Growing rice on the moon! Feeding hungry people here. But it said tiny “grains of ice.”