The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(70)
Based on Gage’s personality changes, which grew over time, the rail road would not rehire him. Dr. Harlow wrote that the balance between Gage’s “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” was gone. Gage worked a stint in P. T. Barnum’s New York museum, where audience members purportedly paid to part his hair and see his pulsing brain.
He carried the tamping iron around with him for the rest of his life.
*
Is it ridiculous for me to associate this stake event with what happens in a stroke? Is a stroke a weaponized event, a kind of warfare? An injury? An accident?
There are two main kinds of strokes. In one, your brain bleeds. In another, your brain clots. My mom had the bleeding kind. It’s called a hemorrhagic stroke, and only 15 percent of strokes are this kind, but they kill a lot more people than the other kind. They’re the serious players.
The main risk factor for any kind of stroke is high blood pressure. Other risk factors include high blood cholesterol, smoking, drug abuse, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and a few other things.
She didn’t have any of these.
Half of people who have had a serious hemorrhagic stroke live less than one year.
In the corridor and waiting room outside the ICU, where we spent weeks and then months, I read a lot about strokes. Websites, pamphlets, books, essays, research. I was given a book by one of the neighbors called My Stroke of Insight. It’s written by a neuroscientist, a young woman, who has a stroke. The book recounts, in as much detail as she can recall, what it actually physically felt like to have the stroke, the way language and meaning slipped away from her, the way the panic of what was happening flitted away, too, gone down the stream like everything else. The way, for months, she was in some calm, peaceful, timeless float, and how it was actually quite pleasant. I loved that part, thinking that my mom might be somewhere outside time and stress, maybe not even aware of what was lost because of how beautifully things were gained.
But then the book shifted. This scientist recovered. She regained her speech, and her ability to walk, and she eventually went back to work as a goddamned neuroscientist and wrote this really interesting book about the whole thing and is quite Zen about the experience, like she’s grateful she learned how to slow down in that peaceful golden field of the brain’s nether regions. Maybe, in fact, all the people with serious left hemisphere strokes were in there together, spread out in a field of soft grass and low golden dusk light, running their fingertips across daisies and very sweetly smiling at one another when they passed. But the neuroscientist left. She recovered. Like, fully. I mean, it’s great, it’s amazing, good for her and her family, yada yada, but she became the story of the person who went all the way to the edge and then came back; she left my mom in that field all alone. And what about the rest of us? For those who never quite leave the field completely? Why aren’t there more stories for the other side?
I’m just scared for her there, in that field, all alone. She probably can’t watch out for snakes anymore. Doesn’t even know what they are. I just wish I could be there, on the edge even, behind a tree so I wouldn’t upset her peace, with a loaded shotgun. I’d have binoculars and ammo slung across my chest and I’d scan the horizon, scoping out the enemy.
WHERE YOUR NAME IS WRIT
Day 56 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
Between two meat-grinders, we have one small county fair in Wisconsin, a holdover, and it’s time for Pipscy to go. She asks to be dropped off at the bus station before we begin setup, but there’s no time.
We do not all stand around wishing her well as she gets ready to leave. Many in our crew don’t say goodbye. We start unloading the truck and then she is sort of just … gone. She had called a cab to come pick her up at the fairgrounds, apparently.
To leave before the agreed-upon time is to become a deserter, a status made permanent by the Sharpie marker that lives in the back end of the semi. On the walls, which form the borders of our backstage area and living space, the backdrop to our lives at all hours of every day, her fate, along with the fates of many others, is written:
PIPSCY
Couldn’t hack it
Those words mesmerize me. Couldn’t hack it. It isn’t just that there is an action you aren’t completing—it doesn’t say abandoner, or left early, or anything that externalizes the events. Instead, it is a simple statement about you, your capacity as a person, what you are made of, if you have any guts. Can you do this thing or not?
TESSA
Couldn’t hack it
The possibility is devastating.
*
The ship arrives in London, and Davy sends an update.
“Something extraordinary happened last nite. I don’t know exactly what it was or even how to describe it, but at 4am Teresa grabbed my hand and started ‘talking.’ Not words, but stringing together sounds which she had previously only made one at a time and with some concentration. Now they were flowing like a dam had burst. She went on for about 45 minutes. Her tone was excited and happy! She indicated that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need anything. She was just talking and singing about stuff. We fell back asleep about 5 and slept until 9am.
“This morning she indicated that she remembered what had happened the night before and it seemed that there was no particular sensation associated with it. So it is a mystery now. We’ll see how it goes today.”