It Happened To Me: I Got Hit By A Drunk In A Truck. I Learned And Forgot That A Few Hundred Times
I acquired the same type of brain injury former representative Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head.
Hi lovely AJPT people,
I'm going to save my little updates for you until tomorrow, because I want to give all the attention today to this beautiful post. Working on this with Judith has been working with a true artist. (Growing up with two artists as parents, this is my highest compliment.) She is also incredibly thoughtful - she knew how much I love “Brain On Dictionary” (see it below) and sent me a copy of it out of the blue this morning with just the note “For You.” I cherish it.
If you love Judith’s work as much as I do, you can find her writing about this and other topics lots of other places, but I highly recommend you subscribe to her own Substack that is linked at the bottom of the post.
Have a wonderful wonderful Wednesday and beyond.
Jane
By Judith Hannah Weiss
On the last day of my first life, I got in a car and never came back. At about the same time, which was 10 AM on a Tuesday, a woman named Mrs. Cream ran out of breakfast beer. So she stole a truck, crashed into a storefront and crushed a parked car. I was in the car.
I came to on a freezing table in a paper gown. I was afraid of the metal taste, the tilting room, the deafening roar of a nurse, the techs tweezing glass from my skin. Someone in scrubs asked if I knew why I was there. I pointed to my head. Someone else asked if I knew my address. I pointed to my head again. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn’t my life.
The next time I came to, my head was in a helmet studded with electrodes. Probes punctured my scalp to survey my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, there was a probe for the lobe. The good news is I survived. The bad news was brain damage.
One moment I was in the semi-glamorous often brutal if-you-can-make-it-here-you-can-make-it-anywhere feel of Manhattan in the 80s, 90s and early naughts. The Vanity Fair-New York-Tina Brown-Devil-Wears-Prada years. I freelanced for each of them. The next moment, I was in a-funny-thing-happens when you’re extracted from a wreck. Or rather, a not funny thing that locked me in a life no one would choose with a brain no one would pick.
Me in 2006, a few months prior to accident
I pointed to a shoe because I couldn’t say “shoe.” Or I pointed to my head. I needed words I didn’t have to say words I couldn’t say. That is called aphasia. Imagine you are trying to speak and no one can understand you. That's what it's like to live with aphasia. Imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them. That’s what it’s like, too.
My brain had been repeatedly sliced by the sharp bones inside the skull, resulting in "the single broadest gap" the doctor had ever seen.
You might wonder how it feels to wake up one day and not know who you are. I don’t know. I don’t remember. You lose short-term recall, long-term recall, words, space and time. Or you recall a fragment of something, but find it and lose it almost at once. That is called amnesia. My body was 56 when my new brain arrived. Someone new was in my place. Someone new who had my face.