A STITCH OF TIME

by Shawn Newton

"...if someone said would you rather jump off this terrace four-stories high or have this brain injury where you won’t be able to speak, read or write and we don’t know how it's going to play out. I would have stepped off the terrace."

“I don’t remember stopping the song. I don’t remember the fall.”

When I first met Lauren Marks, she was picking up a picture the Courier had printed for her. There was nothing unusual about her except an eccentric hairstyle and a graceful, considered manner. She paid for the picture, wrote a note on the back of a card, a thank you to Samar Fay, the editor, for printing the photo and left. I was about to place the thank you on Samar’s desk when curiosity got the better of me. I turned it over. It was a business card and in that moment my perception of the young woman changed considerably. The card read “A Stitch of Time: Diary of an Aphasiac.” Aphasiac? According to Webster’s, aphasia is a loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words, usually resulting from brain damage. Aphasiac? Clearly the young woman I just met could use and comprehend words. In fact the first thing I noticed was how clearly she spoke. The card had a web site. I went to my computer and entered the address. The homepage displayed the image you see above. It was her. Her name, Lauren Marks. I was now intrigued.

Lauren is indeed an aphasiac. Opportunity and a certain amount of boredom brought Lauren to the 2007 Fringe Festival, the world's largest arts festival, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two years ago to the day that I sat down with Lauren, she was onstage in a small pub focused and determined to win.

“I was onstage, singing in Priscilla’s bar, trying to win the prize money for the best karaoke performance of the night. Two of my closest friends were in the dingy dive with me. One was in the audience, whistling, recording the performance on his digital camera. The other friend was singing with me, the second voice in our power duet of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'.

“I don’t remember stopping the song. I don’t remember the fall.”

“When I woke up from the 12-hour emergency surgery, the doctors explained: It was an undetected brain aneurysm that had ruptured onstage, and they told me I was lucky. Fifty percent of people who experience a ruptured aneurysm die instantly. Fifty percent of survivors suffer delayed death in subsequent days. Those who survive that, live with lasting deficits. My aneurysm ruptured in the Broca’s area, a language center of the brain, so it would drastically alter my abilities to speak, read, and write. I was an aphasiac.”

As Lauren points out, the moment she fell could have easily been the last night of her life. At 27, Lauren Marks, statistically, should have been dead. Instead, as her grandmother, Helen Marks, pointed out,

“You’re very lucky.”

“Lucky, right?” Lauren replied “Why lucky?”

“I worked for years in Glasgow as a nurse and I never saw anyone live through a ruptured aneurysm.”

“And I was sort of flabbergasted.” Lauren recalled. “You have to be at the right place at the right time.”

And being lucky was not the end of Lauren’s story. It would seem at times that she was exactly the right person to tackle this affliction.

“In lots of ways I was sort of tailor fit for something like this. I mean I really cared about language…the things that I did, why I did it, why I was drawn to it was often language- based.”

The recovery process for many aphasiacs is often described using two words: depression and isolation. One could easily assume that for someone so immersed in language, those two words would be frighteningly accurate.

“Not much depression, in fact almost none. Detachment, yes. The first three months I just didn’t really feel emotional about anything. The only thing I was passionate about or curious about was language.”

Lauren's ability to be passionate was based largely on her own ignorance about her deficit.

“I just didn’t know how bad it was until I had recovered more and then I was like, wow, that could have been a cause for concern but in the middle of it, it was too exciting. There were too many things that were strange and intriguing, things that I just never examined before, like homonyms and homophones. Would and wood? I just thought that was amazing. That period in as far as I can recall there was no depression.”

While depression didn't swallow her and Lauren was passionately re-engaging with language, there lingered a certain realization that this was not something she would choose.

"...if someone said would you rather jump off this terrace four-stories high or have this brain injury where you won’t be able to speak, read or write and we don’t know how its going to play out. I would have stepped off the terrace."

Choice or not, she pushed forward and turned the situation to her advantage. Her language deficit became an opportunity to strip away years of taking language for granted and allow a child-like engagement with her passion.

“If it had been a brain injury that affected my calculus I wouldn’t even notice it was gone. I re-engaged with language and the passion of learning, the way I did as a four-year-old. I had forgotten why I had been so interested in all these pursuits that were language-based- writing, performing.”

Armed with positivity, Lauren recovered slowly. Over time and with the support of family and friends she regained her abilities. Part of her recovery process included extensive journaling. From a usable vocabulary consisting of a few dozen words at the start to almost complete recovery a year later, she documented her rebirth into the world of language.

As my curiosity had been piqued by the young woman’s business card, so too would Lauren’s. After several months of journaling she felt compelled to look back at what she had documented.

“The excerpt left me aghast. I hadn’t realized my case of aphasia had been so severe. I almost remember writing those words, almost remember what I was thinking as I wrote them: I thought that words weren’t a problem anymore. So much of my language had already returned by that point, I expected I must be almost fully 'recovered'.

Reading that page, I saw the journal writer’s discrepancy, saw a writer who couldn’t know the gaping discrepancies as she wrote, and that writer also happened to be me.”

It would be this discrepancy that would drive Lauren to write a book. It would be a work in using one of the most engaging tools in literature, the unreliable narrator. In her memoir, Lauren, at once author and subject, would never be able to fully reconcile the journal writer and the author of the memoir.

Lauren acknowledges that in many respects she is able to pursue her endeavors and her recovery in a certain manner because of her age.

“It's around 28 that everyone starts making their place in the world.”

Lauren wasn't married; she didn't have children; she was pursuing her Ph.D. at New York University when the aneurysm ruptured. And while she doesn’t anticipate returning to grad school, she is aware that while her upheaval was motivated by brain trauma and not marriage or career, she is not alone in this period of transition.

“While I was away everyone I knew was in huge moments of transition in their lives, each and every one. This is a growing pain period. It’s just a potential time, and things have not been accomplished yet. You haven’t yet disappointed yourself.”

Lauren’s aneurysm has stifled a certain amount of her potential.

“In many situations I am at the cusp of handling it, you know I could never go back to grad school. The pace of that, the amount of work, even an office- these things that were easy for me- I get befuddled. And when I get befuddled, my language gets pretty dicey. And those moments are the closest things to depression. Not knowing when the recovery starts and when it’s just ‘normal’.”

Despite being on the “cusp” in certain situations Lauren has tackled an overwhelming task for anyone and seemingly impossible for those living with aphasia.

Lauren’s abilities bring light to the murky depths of misunderstanding. Aphasiacs' carry the burden of stigma. Many suffer because people mistakenly believe that their condition affects their intelligence. Even those sufferers still struggling with 30 words possess the same intelligence they had prior to their condition. It is the struggles with misunderstanding that often drive aphasiacs deeper into isolation and depression. Most cases of recovery begin with support and understanding of friends and family.

“My surgeries and therapies have all been successful, but I’m still aphasiac and will always be. I’ll always have problems with words. I stutter sometimes; I get easily confused. It's strange how many lives we can ferry around in our skins. In one lifetime, we can be a child and an adult, an astrophysicist and an Alzheimer’s patient. It’d be more disturbing if it wasn’t also wondrous, so many lives crammed into a single body, a body where I can be a writer and an aphasiac. On the anniversary of the aneurysm’s rupture, my friend sent me the video he recorded the night of the karaoke collapse. I saw the instant the rupture began. The audience laughed as I fell from the stage. I was hopelessly nauseous seeing a room of impotent observers not realizing a life seeping away in front of them. I had to watch the video a few more times before I saw the hands. The bartender’s hands, my friend’s hands, the audience’s hands: they had all reached down soon after me—a virtue of a fall from any stage. Onstage, there will be someone who will see it. There might be someone who can help you up.”

Lauren Marks lives in southern California with her parents and grandmother. She has finished the book and with the help of a literary agent is currently seeking a publisher and an editor to hone the material.