(We know, horribly, what happens when the frontal lobe is impaired because of the controversial lobotomy surgeries practiced in the 1950s and 1960s. One such method, the “ice pick” lobotomy, made infamous by Rosemary Kennedy, was a procedure in which a doctor would peel back the patient’s eyelid, insert a metal spike above the eyeball until it hit the top of the orbit, and then tap, tap, tap into the brain for several minutes.49 This imprecise procedure severed several frontal lobe connections, yielding results ranging from dulled emotions to childish behaviors. Some patients were even rendered completely devoid of serious thought and feeling, much like what happened to Randle McMurphy, Jack Nicholson’s character in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)
Although my frontal lobes were perhaps taking longer to repair (as some emerging research shows) than other areas, there was nevertheless improvement. In the hospital, one doctor had described my frontal lobe function as being “close to zero.” I had, at the very least, improved from nothing.
By the end of dinner, I was so groggy that I put my head on the table and slept straight through the conversation until my own snores woke me up. Shaking myself awake, I headed up the steep metal staircase to the speaker dock that held my iPod. I had recently downloaded the Rihanna song “Umbrella,” even though it had been out for a few years and it wasn’t even necessarily my typical style of music. Now her stylized, R&B-tinged vocals wafted through the summer night.
I looked down with fondness at my father, Stephen, and Giselle and swayed to the music, suddenly filled with buoyant energy. The music blared, and I began to move my body to the beat, almost absentmindedly, until I was fully rocking out, maybe not exactly gracefully but nowhere near as stiffly and robotically as I had at the wedding a month earlier. Giselle was moved by the glow in Stephen’s face when he glanced up and caught me dancing so freely. For a long time it had seemed as if I had existed in a walking coma, but now they all saw life in this awkward reggae dance.
Stephen joined me up on the steps, took me in his arms, and twirled me around, as we laughed at how silly we looked. My father and Giselle joined hands and slow-danced to the upbeat song.
CHAPTER 41
CHRONOLOGY
The brain is radically resilient; it can create new neurons and make new connections through cortical remapping, a process called neurogenesis. Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless.) This amazing malleability is called neuroplasticity. Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.
It was during that dreaded third hospital stay that my true moment of awakening occurred; I began keeping a diary, started reading again, and first expressed the desire to understand what had happened to me. Perhaps because the diary provides physical evidence of my budding self (I can literally read the thoughts of that wounded Susannah), I can in essence begin to remember what it was like to be her, unlike the earlier Susannah from those paranoid diary entries before the hospital, who was more like a figment of a shadowy memory, so distant that she might have been a character in a horror movie. Yet the person I read about in my recovery diary is childlike and prosaic, unlike that umbral pre-hospital self who could, even at her most obscured, be eerily illuminating. Yet, there are surprising similarities between this diary and the journals I kept during junior high school. In each, there’s a stunning lack of insight and curiosity about myself. In place of deep thought, there are dozens of passages dedicated to my body (weight gain in the recovery piece and lack of breasts in the junior high journal) and silly, petty issues of the day (hating hospital food versus fighting with frenemies). I sympathize with this vulnerable, budding Susannah, as I do that preteen version of myself, but she is still not entirely me, as I am now.
I wrote my first entry at the hospital, dated June 3, 2009, while I was receiving the second IVIG infusion. My father, who had stayed with me every morning as usual during that third hospital stay, helped me write, suggesting that I try to retrace my lost time by compiling a chronology of events from my own memory. My list began with “numbness and sleepiness” and ended with “seizure 3 in the hospital.” I had nothing to record after I had bought that cappuccino in the admitting area of the hospital on March 23. In making the list I had also gone back and crammed the words “night at Dad’s house” in between “seizure 2” and “seizure 3,” almost as an afterthought. This line is the least legible, and with good reason: I was still uncertain and ashamed of my behavior that toxic night (as I am to this day), and it showed even in my handwriting.
My writing was still unfamiliar, but it was a far cry from the infantile notes I had made during my first hospital stay. I could now write in full sentences and even use a semicolon. But what is most telling about my list is the absence: there are no memories at all from my time in the hospital.
My father looked over the page with alarm. It was the first confirmation of my profound memory loss. But he hid his surprise and helped me add in some pieces from his own recollection, providing a more fleshed-out version of events. However, there are still clear omissions, which were both my father’s and mine. The gaps are minor but telling, since memory loss can occur not only in brain injury but also with emotional trauma. No one close to me during this time had been spared.
My father indulged in this chronology entirely for my benefit, because he despised speaking of that time. His new motto had become: “To move forward, you have to leave the past behind.” But Giselle would later tell me privately how hard the situation had been on him. He was a wreck. When other family members called for updates, he’d wave away the phone, certain that he would lose his hard-won composure once he heard familiar voices. My brother remembers speaking to our dad over the phone while he was still in school and I was still in the grips of a mysterious illness. At one point in the conversation the only sound James could hear on the other line were deep gulps of air meant to mask the sounds of heavy sobs.
Then there is the private journal, which my father, in lieu of talking directly to me about what happened, decided to hand over to me for my research. These entries allowed me to relive the hospital stay from my father’s perspective. I read and reread every line; there were moments of laughter and solemn times, and then there were passages so heartwrenching that I wanted to race over to him in Brooklyn and give him a bear hug. But I knew better than to do that. “To move forward, you have to leave the past behind.” Though I wasn’t ready to do that myself, I could, at least for his sake, follow his motto when it related to him. My strong Irish protector was, at the heart of it all, a big softie, and his love for me, something that during our roughest times I had questioned, was immeasurable. “All I knew was that she was alive, and her spirit was intact. We had more hospital stays for treatments, doctor visits, and lots of medications to deal with, but my baby was on the way home,” the journal ends.
Though I never properly thanked my father (or, for that matter my mom, Stephen, my friends, or even the doctors and nurses), we now met for dinner regularly, which was a vast improvement over the once-every–six months relationship we had had before. Sometimes, now, over a meal, we lock eyes and begin speaking in some sort of secret code, which could be described as an otherworldly connection, inadvertently freezing out everyone else at the table. I never realized how rude we often were until Giselle later brought it up. “I don’t think you guys are aware of it,” she confided, “but sometimes it’s hard for people around you to feel included.”