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CHAPTER 1
INTERSECTION OF THEN AND NOW
Julia Anne Miller
On a peaceful May morning, at a quiet intersection in a still-sleeping part of town, a man in a truck ran a red light and changed my world.
I recall very little about the accident itself. I am driving slowly through the intersection, attention focused forward, wanting to be certain the lady across from me, whose left turn signal is flashing, recognizes my intention to go straight. It seems we are the only two people up and about, except for the driver and kids on the school bus my son has just boarded. There is a stunning slam of something hard against my head and left side, loud yet muted, and for the slightest fraction of a second, I know I've been hit by another car, and instinctively pull my tiny dog, who is sleeping on my lap, against my chest, then a woman's voice, then a man's, and a slow realization that things are different. Days later, I will remember what the voices are saying: "I saw you! You ran the light!" "Oh, my God, I didn't see her! I didn't see her!"
People are outside my car, trying to open the door, shouting. My head is pounding, like a harsh heartbeat. The female voice, from afar: "You've been in an accident. EMS is on the way. They're on their way. What's your name, honey?" I'm confused and say nothing. I think time passes. Sirens, then my door is making a terrible sound. A person is kneeling next to me, telling me to remain still, but I'm not moving. My dog, Willie, is removed from where I am still holding him against my chest. He is limp but alive. Later, his hair will gray in the exact pattern of how I am holding him. His personality will never be the same, but neither will mine. I am lifted into the air, then I'm in a moving vehicle, strapped flat. My left side shakes uncontrollably. I try to stop it because it hurts, but I can't. I am so cold. Someone is talking to me, keeps talking. I'm in a bright hallway, moving quickly, the ceiling rushing past, and still the talking, talking, someone asking me questions. I know I'm in the emergency room, but it's moving so quickly, there are so many people. I'm asked my birthday. I get it wrong. I get the year wrong as well, give a last name I haven't used in decades.
The lights are too bright. I am in a strange fog. A screen of flickering white covers my vision, like an off-the-air old-fashioned television screen. My daughter and son-in-law are facing me, my brother is wearing the same purple polo shirt as the doctor. Time passes. We are told there is no internal bleeding, nothing is broken. But my sacral lumbar region, at the base of my spine, is swelling, a concern because a disc is malformed, leaving my spinal cord unprotected. On my left side, my sinuses are damaged, my septum deviated, a molar displaced, and my face, upper back, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle are still swelling and bruising. Bright spider webs of light cross my visual field. No breaks, no bleeding. I want to go home and check on Willie. He must be completely traumatized. I am to return if my thinking and vision don't begin to clear within eight hours and see my doctor within 48 hours even if they do. I agree, then promptly forget. I am confused and disoriented but happily leave with my family. When I stand up from the wheelchair at the emergency room exit, my pelvis dislocates. The life I know now begins.
It begins mostly alone in my apartment for five days because my daughter is in labor and there's no one to check on me. My care is in the hands of two teenage boys who do not yet drive, cannot grocery shop or cook. They don't know how to help me. I don't know how to ask. Awkward and embarrassed, they take turns listening for me to fall in the bathroom. At the five-day mark, I can't move due to head pain, and the doctor sends a taxi to pick me up.
It continues with eight hours of physical therapy per week for six weeks. The first day, my shoulder slips out of place. Neuromuscular electrical stimulation to reduce muscle spasms and pain, and ultrasound therapy to treat deep bruising are administered at each session. There is pain when moving, pain when still.
I take Willie outside three times a day, slowly descending and climbing the stairs leading to my apartment. I am dizzy and off balance, but Willie will let no one else near him. At first, we just step onto the grass. After a couple of weeks, we can walk half a block and back. I am determined for my life to be as normal as possible. I keep waiting for my head to clear.
Double vision and light patterns last for two weeks, followed by sensitivity to light. When my light tolerance gets worse in the fall, I visit my ophthalmologist of fifteen years. I explain my head injury, ask if my eyes are damaged. My eyes are healthy, he says. With his best attempt at hiding his shock at my intellectual decline, and somehow managing to not sound condescending, he suggests sunglasses. He explains that the light has changed because leaves have fallen from the trees. He adds I could also wear hats with brims that would shade my eyes. These things have not occurred to me.
I cannot make a grocery list. I cannot count. I cannot understand storylines on television shows. I watch the same movie five times in the first two weeks, trying to remember the plot, but each time, parts of the story are new. I think it is morning all day, most days, probably because I feel like I just woke up after a restless night and need coffee. Apparently, I state this exact feeling several times a day, every day. I pay the same bills twice in one day, a couple of different days. I try to order a pizza online, get frustrated and cry, too loud and too long. My teenage sons sit on the couch beside me, bewildered. They are as powerless as I am. There is nothing they can do.
For the first month, I cannot comprehend what I read. When I reach the end of a paragraph, I have forgotten the beginning. I never regain the ability to read directions or descriptions of unfamiliar processes.
I forget that my granddaughter is left handed. I forget being in the delivery room when she was born. I forget to turn off the stove. I forget to use a potholder to remove hot pans from the oven. I forget I am cooking and leave the kitchen. I forget to close the front door. I forget to put on shoes when I leave the house. I forget I've said the same thing over and over. I forget, I forget, I forget.
Sometimes I cry when something is funny, laugh at heartbreaking news. If I make a phone call, I stutter, then lose the correct order of words. I can no longer understand spoken instructions. When people laugh after speaking, I have no idea what's funny. Why won't my head clear?
My daughter looks at me with fear in her eyes. She is all efficiency and nonchalance, believing she can mask it. The doctor says give it six weeks, then eight weeks, then three months, six, nine, a year, and then stops saying anything.
Rehabilitation therapy seems endless as months pass. They teach me how to organize my clothes to get dressed, to fix my hair in a simple style. It's too difficult so I cut it. I learn to navigate the perimeter of the grocery store. Therapists caution me to avoid loud places, bright places, places with more than one person talking. I don't consistently recall their lessons.
My visual memory resets every few seconds. I cannot retain information long enough for it to be stored in my short-term memory. I cannot transfer simple information from one piece of paper to another. For months, I can go nowhere unfamiliar alone. I enter a room for the first time over and over. Unfamiliar faces are new, then new, then new again. Simple directions are frustrating and hard. Step one, then step two, then ... what was step one?
My left side develops a mind of its own. I walk into stationary objects, fall, and stumble on my left, live with a dozen bruises, nicks, and scratches. I veer to the left when walking, following a terrain that appears wavy and uneven. I don't know it yet, but I have a neurological blind spot on my left and have lost depth vision. I have a small permanent bruise on my left cheekbone to complement my slight left-side facial droop. I struggle to complete tasks with my left hand. I concentrate hard, but it shakes and ignores my intentions. I open the oven door with my right hand and pour dinner directly inside with my left, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. I knock dishes off counters. I drop, rather than place, glasses onto the table. My hand twitches and I fling food. I am a terrible dinner date.
I don't like to look at pictures of the baking and furniture projects I once loved. I feel loss and sadness, but mostly I mourn being able to remember what it felt like to enjoy them.
After fourteen months have passed, my neurological tests are repeated — four hours, then three more. The damage is determined to be primarily in the area that affects vision, visual memory and processing, and visual-spatial relationships. There is likely damage in the corpus callosum, the band assisting communication between the frontal lobes, as well. Some of my right brain functions are in the <1 to 10 percentile. My left brain is in better shape, but there are odd spots of diminished ability. I am told that things have improved as much as they will. My brain is askew. I learn to be lopsided.
I am referred to a neuro-ophthalmologist for several more hours of testing because my neuropsychologist says I become "stimulus-bound by objects in the left visual field." The new doctor discovers the blind spot in my left eye. The left refuses to work in tandem with the right. I have difficulty tracking objects. My eye is perfectly healthy and capable of vision, but my brain doesn't acknowledge that parts of my left side exist. My brain "neglects the left." I can't tell because my left brain automatically creates its own substitutes for the missing parts of my visual field, and tells me I see everything. I am completely confused by this information. I believe my brain: I see everything, perceive the world not partially, but completely. Even now, I can't really understand this. How can I be partially blind and not know it? I want to understand what I am not seeing.
When I return to work as a library page, putting things in alphabetical and numerical order, over and over, for twenty hours per week, I find the repetition and predictability soothing. The state Office for Vocational Rehabilitation teaches me to keep a card with the alphabet close at hand, but I still confuse L with P and put S before R. Sometimes I alphabetize in reverse order. I know the order of numbers, but at times there's a disconnect between that knowledge and the ability to put them correctly in sequence.
Over time, I learn that if I initiate conversation, I can usually control it, but I might pause mid-sentence and have trouble starting back up. I stutter when I least expect it. I forget the names of objects and describe them instead: "that flat thing where people sit and eat food." I randomly substitute words that start with the same letter. I will always remember when I took a very long time to figure out how to hang three pictures. I finally succeed, and proudly record in my journal that I hung three potatoes on the wall.
I find I have difficulty answering unanticipated direct questions. Even if I know the answer, I can't immediately find it. My doctor likens it to a computer trying to load. The circle spins and spins. Approximately two minutes later, long after the conversation has moved on, the answer finds me. Or I might give an answer that is unrelated to the question without realizing it until later, if at all.
I no longer understand humor and metaphors. My brain translates the words literally. I grow confused or begin to carry out actions that were intended as a joke. It makes for awkward social interactions.
Throughout my navigation of life with a traumatic brain injury, I maintain the ability to write. It saves me. When I cannot clearly speak my thoughts, or engage in spoken conversation in a meaningful way, when I can't risk saying the wrong thing on a sensitive subject, I can sit at my keyboard and write. I can write out long responses to anticipated questions for unavoidable social settings, then practice speaking them out loud.
When I finally realize my head is not going to clear, my essential human nature kicks in and begins my life story anew. When the process of restoration starts, I find myself nearly unrecognizable. I don't remember who I was, nor do I know who I am.
I record my days on paper. I write poetry. As my ability to read returns, I write about what I am reading. The process of writing begins to bring me back to myself. She's a new self, and I don't know her intuitively yet. She confuses me, but I am learning to live with her.
Looking in the mirror, it is hard not to feel the jolt of an old and a new self. I am bound by my unhappy relationship with the reflection I see — the slight fall to the left side of my face, the tiny bruise on my cheekbone, the diminished animation and downward slant of the left side of my mouth.
It's important to grieve, to mourn the loss of who I was. It has been a very concrete process for me, through months of testing, cognitive therapy, trial and error, and learning ways to work around my neurological deficits. It has also been a vague, dream-like awareness that something is gone.
It is equally important to accept parts of my brain simply can't work. Every day when I pull into my parking spot at home, I count on my fingers how long it has been since Willie has been outside. I have a difficult time with details, and can't remember the month, the day of the week, the ages of my grandchildren. I write the wrong words when making notes and writing lists. I find odd, incoherent sentences written in a loose hand on pieces of paper throughout my house. I have no idea what I meant to say.
But I remind myself to go ahead and dance to the sometimes-discordant music I now hear. The rhythm has changed, and it slips off into strange riffs, but it still has a melody of sorts. The notes will continue to become more familiar over time. I decide to celebrate my birthday on the day of the accident, May 13, the day my new self was born.
CHAPTER 2
SHOOTING A DEER
Amy Lou Jenkins
He's not really my uncle, but I call him Uncle Bill. He's been my Aunt Lil's boyfriend for a dozen years. Bill is a carpenter, mason, electrician, and hunter. Hard of hearing, he just starts up a-talkin' about what's on his mind rather than responding to a conversation. "She come up from the swamp and raised her nose in the air. Arrow pierced her heart; she went down quick."
He chewed swamp-doe venison sausage while he talked. My up-north Wisconsin relatives spend their November vacations and weekends in the swamps and fields of northeastern Wisconsin. The meat is important to their winter diet, so all are thankful that the chronic wasting disease that has infected other parts of the state's deer population, has not been found in Marinette County. My relatives wouldn't starve without the venison, but the hunt, the freezers and mason jars of venison steaks and roasts, and the recipes for cooking the lean protein are essential to the up-north culture. Our German and English ancestors came to this land based on the promise of land, game, and a kind of freedom that feels related to what goes on between humanity and the forest.
* * *
When I was a young girl, my parents made perennial November drives from Milwaukee to the land where my Mother had hunted and dogged every autumn in her memory. When I was about nine, they taught me to dog; I never carried a gun but helped the hunters with my little-girl squeal. Relatives who knew the terrain chose a square of land. Eight to ten of us, dogs and hunters alike got in line, yelping and stomping to flush out deer, while other hunters stood in watchful wait.
The woods were cold, but my belly was warm with eggs, hash browns, and fried ham and bacon. We even ate apple pie. Since it was Grandpa's breakfast favorite and apples were easy to find on abandoned land that had once been farmed by families, everyone got a pass to eat pie with eggs. Along with parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and hunting pals, we all gorged on a big old farm breakfast. These folks were bonded by their familiarity with 4 a.m. farm mornings, and the hunt further bonded the group as providers of meat for the family. In our family, the men and women hunted, and that was also a source of pride for me. That kitchen was wood-stove warm, smelled of coffee and fried bacon, and rattled with the chatter of hunting plans. They used specialized words I didn't understand.
"If we drive the Spikehorn, Evie can use her old stand — where she shot the eight-point year before last."
"The road off the Long Slide's been showing activity."
"You using the 30 ought 6, or going back to the McMillan?"
They sounded competent and excited, chewin' and fast talkin' at the yellow aluminum-edged table.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Corners"
by .
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