Performances
The Moth StorySLAM, Santa Monica, CA, May 25, 2009
The Moth is storytelling done live and without notes - which is, basically, an aphasiac's nightmare. For someone who has a speech impairment, improvising onstage is both terrifying and thrilling (And I think can be illustrated in how many times I close my eyes in this video...). The Moth has locations in New York and LA - and offers free podcasts. Check them out.
Facing The Music
Live Storytelling
Spark, Santa Monica, May 4, 2009
[excerpt] The second surgery was more risky and more rare than the one before it. First, I was afraid I would lose my life on an operating table. Then, I was afraid I would lose my language.
I thought of the brain as a map, and the distance traveled on that map was measured in millimeters. When the surgeon’s scalpel travels a distance in the patient’s brain, he alters the map. A slice could cut out your love of tempura or the use or your right hand or your ability to reason morally. Changing that improbable topography, the surgeons could change the person the map belonged to. If I woke up, who would I be when I woke up? I had to believe that the Worst-Case-Scenario wouldn’t happen—and I couldn’t plan for that if it did—but I had to deal with the terror of language loss, of starting over.
[download PDF]
Articles
The Awakening
An aneurysm is hardly a straightforward injury. It is not a leg that can be re-set, a gash to be stitched back together. The blessing of awakening from an aneurysm is also the complication of awakening to a new brain... Now, I find that my mind is not a single, individual thing, but many more unknown and disparate things.
Read more at the Brain Aneurysm Foundation website.
To download the pdf, click on vol 7, No. 2, Summer 2008.
Nuts
We know of Hazel because she is in my Grandma's water aerobics class, though I have never met her. But last year, I had brain surgery, and Hazel dropped off a couple of gifts; an afghan and some baklava. Nice, though the heavy afghan was somewhat unnecessary in LA, and I couldn't eat the baklava because I'm allergic to nuts. If Hazel had known me, she would have known this. But she doesn't know me. She is a total stranger that leaves sweet and misguided gifts on my doorstep.
Read more at the Mad As Hell Club
My neurologist seriously advises me to sing along to the radio, a prescription for a neuro-plastic routine. I slough through the songs, the pledge of allegiance. I spend hours in the shower, memorizing a line to try to repeat it back: Deep in the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing..." Thirteen months ago, I was a PhD student, a performer, a writer—thirteen months ago I was a brain patient with a vocabulary of 30 words. So, I soak up the mimic, the music in language, anything I could borrow from. I mimic the song, mimic you singing the song. Why not? If once I had a small way with words, words are now having their large way with me.
Read more at freshyarn.com
Excerpts from upcoming articles
Words Fail Me
What was I then, without language to support me, making me a territory of marks and borders, contexts and assertions? For a while, my life was an amorphous mass of incomplete thoughts and dreams that would come and go like the insubstantial wind billowing through the open hospital window. The memory is flummoxed as I grasp for descriptions of myself when I was most unlike myself, as if I were telling someone else's story. A sister, a twin, someone I know so intimately I feel entitled to speak on her behalf. Since her voice doesn't say, can't say, I feel compelled to make small cases for her. In that white, gleaming palace of plastic catheters and ringing beeps, it is, among other things, an unstable home for any parent, who will remember these rooms as a scalding stew of release forms and doctor's advisements, hoverings over their prone daughter's morbidity, her suddenly frail mortality, every night hoping that she will make it through that night. Yet the voice's body and the voice's mind, remember this place, and these moments, as characterized by an unearthly peace, perfect silence, and the blueness of blue. Clarity unadulterated. For what is more satisfying, more beautiful, than an unattached thought, an incomplete dream?
Publication pending
How to Know a Betsy
My hospital suite-mate offers to me to take me down to the soda machine on the first floor, and this is the farthest I have traveled since I have come to the hospital. It is an adventure. She pays for the drink since I have no money, and I doubt I'd be able to count it if I did. I don't recognize the third person in the elevator, before I realize it is me in the mirror on the door, and I am smiling. Something has happened. Something small has happened, and when my parents arrive, I have to tell them that I can't speak as I did yesterday. I want to tell them that I'm fine, but today there are no words for that. I tell them, it's gone, it's gone. I cannot say I'm fine. I can't tell them that I just drank the World's Best Diet Pepsi. But they want me to try, try for the words, and I can't, and don't exactly know what they want, or why they want it, this thing that is expected from me and I can't find my answer in their faces. Faces are cauls, expressions appear deep and distorted, like heads covered and doubly bound in Saran Wrap. But there is an urgency and panic in my parents, and it presses in on me like clenched fists against my chest. They want me to do this thing, they want it now, and I can not give it to them. I don't want their company. I want the end of visiting hours. Today was a good day until this very moment.
Publication pending