1. Tied to a Chair I woke up tied up. I did not know where I was or how I had gotten there. The room was lit in ugly fluorescent yellow, with no windows to testify to the existence of an outside world. Looking down, I saw my wrists bound tight with white cloth rope to the arms of a heavy chair.
At first, disoriented, I tugged quietly at the ropes, then as panic set in, I began to scream. I could handle being kidnapped. I could handle the threat of death, the fear of not knowing what was going on. All I needed was my hands back.
Soon my screams changed to guttural sounds, like an animal caught in a trap. I could no longer make words, could no longer think words. Only frustration. Anger. Pain.
My captors, maybe 4 or 5 men and women of various ages, were a calm, impervious group, sitting around quiet as Sunday. They ignored me as best they could, occasionally glancing my way when I released a particularly vocal scream.
Eventually I could not scream anymore. My voice and my energy were gone. I lay quietly, waiting.
A girl about my age walked by me on her way to the kitchen. “Please,” I whispered, hoping to catch her away from the others, “please, please untie me.”
She looked at me, and I could see pity in her eyes. She glanced over at a shadowy figure in the corner, and uttered something in a language I could not understand. Then she turned back to me and shrugged. “I can’t,” she said sadly, offering no explanation, and walked away.
I started to scream again, trying desperately to draw some attention. But no one noticed. They remained stoic, unmoved by my flagrant display of the outer limits of hysteria a human can be driven to by fear.
When I began to calm down from exhaustion, my nose began to itch unbearably. I couldn’t stop myself from straining against my ropes as hard as I could in a futile, unbelievably frustrating attempt to free myself from this torturous itch.
I tried itching it on my shoulder, but it was just out of reach. Breathing deeply, I tried to resign myself to this manically simple physical and mental torture, but I couldn’t do it. I began to sob quietly, my tears increasing the itch in a horrible cycle of frustration and despair. I started to scream again.
A boy who reminded me of my older brother came and sat down by me. He looked so sad and so strong, I felt reassured just to know that these people were indeed human, capable of feeling emotion, even if they could not show it to me. “Here,” he said, slipping a small pouch with unknown contents into my immobile hand, “this will protect you.” I believed him; with something to hold on to my fear subsided immediately. I could hear someone singing the Ramones “I wanna be sedated” in the next room as I finally began to resign myself to my situation. “You look just like my big brother,” I said to the boy in front of me, finally calm enough to talk, not scream. He looked at me with such kindness, and said, “That’s because I am your brother.” I laughed and went back to sleep.
This is what’s referred to as “ICU psychosis.” I refer to it as “getting tied up by a bunch of strangers and doped up beyond belief while having sustained a traumatic brain injury.” The fear is unbelievable.
2. The Crash
March 4th, 2004, 4:30 PM, at the corner of Highway 1 and Laurent St in Santa Cruz, is the time and place I should have died.
A bloodstain the size of a dinner plate, circled in orange spray paint, still marks the spot. The paint is gone but the blood lingers on.
While skateboarding to my nearest corner store, something I would do several times a day, I took a corner too fast, fell into the road, and was hit in the face by a tan colored Volkswagen Thing with the vanity plate “DEUTOR.” Stupid mistake. The woman driving was, and probably still is, named Anita Strong. I have never talked to her.
I lay in the street, choking on my own blood, which was pouring out of my mouth, my ears, one of my eyes, and a hole in my cheek. But not my nose. I have never in my life had a nosebleed. I had three skull fractures, which let air into my brain, 8 shattered bones in my face, and a nail stuck in my cheek. My right arm’s axillary nerve was badly torn, and some of the bone shards had flown into right eye. My pituitary gland was completely smashed. I lost most of my sense of smell. But all of this is just the candy coating around the real damage- my “moderately severe traumatic brain injury.” To me that phrase is scarier than frogs. And I am terrified of frogs.
An off duty firefighter named Joe Cox pulled his car across the road to block the lane I was lying in, and rolled me onto my side before I choked to death on my own blood. I have never talked to him. Sometimes I wonder if he knows he saved my life. Eventually I was taken by ambulance to the Santa Cruz Dominican hospital, and from there I was airlifted to San Jose.
I don’t remember any of this. I had a dream about it, a hazy scene involving an ambulance and a crowd and a child, not me, lying in the road in her socks. There was no blood in the dream. I woke up feeling strangely calm. This is the only dream from right after the accident that did not involve an extreme adrenaline rush.
For a long time all my dreams revolved around an adrenaline rush I did not know was possible to self induce. Incomparably more blood pumping than those dreams where you’re falling or flying. Add some hardcore painkillers and a slice of brain damage and you got some crazy dreams. There was one where my friends all dared me to jump off a flagpole onto a trampoline. There was a recurring one with me riding a motorcycle or bus on a mountain road moving as quickly as you can only in dreams. Sometimes they were scary, sometimes fun. Often there were superheroes and villains involved. Since then I find it much harder to make my heart jump.
I got to sleep through the part where my family is waiting three days to find out if I’m going to live, then another three to find out if I’m going to be a vegetable, and then begininng the process of trying to determine my level of inevitable brain damage.
3. Waking Up
I woke up a week later. The first memory I have is feeling the slippery snake of the respirator being pulled from my lungs. I looked down, my wrists still tied tight to the bed to keep me from touching my face, or yanking out my IV or Fentynal drip. Fentynal is a painkiller 80X stronger than morphine. I still have a small scar over my heart from the needle that pieced my aorta for ten days.
My mother is sitting next to me. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I saw the look in her eyes. I will never forget that look. Children who make their mothers look like that are bad children.
“MeiMei,” she said painfully, “you’re ok sweetie, your fine…” “Bullshit,” I whispered. My first word was bullshit.
“Untie me,” I whispered softly, finding that I had no voice. “What’s that sweetie, I can’t hear you,” my mother leaned in close to my face, saying, “The respirator gave you pneumonia, that’s why you can’t talk. But you’ll be better soon…” “Untie me!” I croaked, interrupting her.
She looked over at the girl who had walked by me on her way to the kitchen, and she came over and released me from bondage. Immediately my hand shot up to my face; my mother tried to grab it, I viscously slapped her hand away, and gloriously, sweetly, in what may still be the single most satisfying physical experience of my entire life, I scratched my nose.
I looked at the hands that lay in my lap. I told the fingers to move, and they did, strangely enough. I bent each finger and watched them respond like little attentive soldiers. I noticed my newly unbound wrists. From the base of my hands halfway to my elbows the skin on the ventral of my arms was blackish purple and swollen, like giant licorice jellybeans. I poked at one inquisitively; with a finger now missing the ring I had worn for over seven years, and felt no pain. I didn’t even feel it at all. I noticed I couldn’t move my right arm from the elbow to the shoulder, but it didn’t really bother me.
When I woke up again, I started to understand a little more of what was going on, but it all struck me as incredibly boring. I kept thinking about being saved from my captors, I did not yet understand that this had all taken place inside my mind.
My thought process went a little like this: God this hospital is boring. So I got hit by a car, like, wow. Why does it have to be so boring? I stared at the clock, watching the little second hand travel arduously around its path, counting each second one by one.
For the first few days I was awake, before I was allowed visitors, it was just me and the nurses. They didn’t say much to me, except stuff like, “no, no more apple juice,” and “no, no soda.” For days all I wanted was a soda, just one orange soda…the one or two cups of juice I got a day were the high points of my existence. Sometimes they were frozen and I would have to wait for them to thaw before I could savor the sweet apple nectar contained in the plastic, foil sealed, punch-me-with-a-straw-here-comes-heaven containers. I always asked for more but was never allowed. In hindsight I think maybe this was a heath precaution, because I hadn’t eaten anything in over a week, but one morning with my barely existent voice I began singing a song; a feeble ode to the joy of soda. The nurses heard me, and I guess they thought it was cute because they brought me two sodas that day, which I downed immediately, and then promptly stood up, wrenching tubes everywhere, and shat on the floor. I can’t say I wasn’t proud.
Brain damage makes strange things interesting, and what should be interesting things, like how your body and mind are going to be for the rest of your life, really boring. The best part was I got to watch the guy who always took my blood pressure on my busted arm, ignoring (or probably just not hearing) my pleas to switch arms, clean up my pile of soda crap. I hated the poor man, and oh, was it satisfying. If I could of talked, I would have said, WHAT, SUCKA! YEAH I MADE THAT!
4. First Steps
A couple hours later my best friends came and visited me for the first time. “I shat on the floor,” I whispered proudly, beeming, as they walked in. The nurses decided it was time for me to get out of bed for the first time, so they took out my IV and fentenyl drip, and gave me a hefty shot of Fentynl to tide me over till they got me back on the drip. Wow. I will remember that shot for the rest of my life. It was like taking a double shot of whiskey to the bloodstream. I actually felt my heart get hot.
“Ellen,” I giggled to my friend as she helped me out of bed, “Your shirt has the same kaleidoscopes as the walls does.” As we entered the hallway I saw a cop sitting on one of the benches, and I immediately did a 180 and ducked back into my room. My friends had to go ask him to move before I would go back into the hall.
Walking felt good, and strange. One thing being bedridden for a week taught me is how crucial it is to be able to take care of yourself. Depending on strangers for things like water or getting out of bed is the worse thing in the world. Especially when they’re all busy and you have no voice to call for them. You might stay thirsty a long time. Not being able to ask for water is much worse than being thirsty. I hope I die before I reach that point again.
5. My New Face
The next day I went in for plastic surgery. My surgeon, Dr Kim, cut inside my mouth, along the gumline, and screwed a bunch of titanium plates onto my broken bones. Then he cut along my eye and shoved some more plates down through my eye. There were 8 plates total. He did a good job.
He stitched my eyelid to my eyebrow to hold my eye up to keep it from drooping for the rest of my life. God, those stitches killed! One of them was sticking right into my eye, and I kept getting up and asking nurses for a pair of scissors so I could cut it out. I got really pissed that they wouldn’t give them to me.
I knew they had scissors because a few days ago they had lent me some to cut off my giant unidredlock of what used to be nice long hair. “No scissors MeiMei, go back to bed,” they would say every time I got up. Looking back on it, I guess that was a good decision on their part. But at the time, it seemed like grounds for escape, and I kept calling my best friend on my cell phone and asking him to come spring me. I got mad at him too when he said he wouldn’t, and began plotting my own escape. I never made it past the end of the hall.
Eventually, after ten long days, I was released, and made my way slowly back home to Santa Cruz, after a few weeks in my parents care in Palo Alto. Those weeks were hell. I was a ball of rage, going through withdrawal from the fentenyl and dealing with the newfound incredible pain.
My parents, bless their well intentioned souls, tried to get me on mood altering drugs to “curb my reckless behavior,” and made me replace my sweatpants, which my friends tried to explain to them I even wear to school, with these ugly, tapered old woman jeans I wouldn’t be caught dead in on laundry day. But they were really going through it emotionally, and I was speaking mostly in swear words to them, so lets just let that sleeping high pitched Chihuahua lie.
Having a fresh brain injury is kind of fun, in some ways. I didn’t really have any idea what was going on, but would listen to the same song all day long and repeat the same sentences for days. One of my favorites was, “if you want to come in, press 6..8..4...on the door…” which I repeated for days until my parents forbade me from saying it anymore. Cartoons were GREAT.
Finally I made it back to Santa Cruz. It seemed like another world. The first few months home every second of every day was consumed with thinking about it. It was strange that something so huge could be huge only to me. Not only was the world still turning, it was exactly the same.
6.Looking in the Hole That was Once My Brain
I glance over Peggy’s shoulder, insulted that she began taking notes before she had even really spoken to me. “She wears sunglasses even in a dark room to protect her injured eye,” I see written on her white pad. What does that have to do with you, I think, getting that discomforting feeling again that something is going on that is entirely beyond my comprehension.
Finally she turns to me and smiles, twisting up her mouth while her eyes remain somber and sincere. “I’m going to conduct a series of tests to see what kinds of cognitive therapy you would benefit from the most. Judging from your school records and from talking to your parents, you have a good chance of functioning on an average level. We find that people who are bright and well educated to begin with are more able to recover from a traumatic brain injury.” Whatever, I think, imagining Peggy writing in pain on the floor. Average? “Alright,” says Peggy, pulling out a stopwatch, “for 60 seconds, I want you to say as many words beginning with the letter S as you can. Ready? Begin.”
I sit and begin to think, my attention involuntarily fixed on the giant hole in my brain I had gotten used to ignoring. “Sit,” I said, and paused. My brain begins to panic with the slow realization that I can’t think of any more words that began with S. “Sad,” my voice cracks, turning my lack of words into an abundance of tears. Hiding behind my giant sunglasses, I sat in silence while Peggy looks only at her watch, waiting for the 60 seconds to end.
Her face trained to lack emotion, she smiles again without her eyes and pulls out a stack of flashcards. For the next two hours Peggy continues to ask my brain things it doesn’t know, questions about the people on the cards who are dressed in 80s jogging suits and are all white except for the token black guy rocking a fat afro. “Look at this picture for 30 seconds,” Peggy would say, holding up a happy family picnic scene. “Now, what do you remember?” I try hard to remember the fuzzy Dick and Jane picnic scene and conclude, “Even the fucking dog was white.”
This set of flashcards was not designed to inspire mixed ethnicity children such as myself, and this seems to me like entirely logical grounds to refuse to participate. I cross my arms and become reticent. “OK, see you next week,” says Peggy. Fuck you, I think again as Peggy leaves. You go to hell and you die. I ice grill her without taking off my shades, resorting to the gruesome stare of contempt I know I possess- hatred is an easy emotion to express without words.
I wander back into my room, mentally exhausted and emotionally weak. My boyfriend looks at me and immediately hugs me. “Its ok,” he says, squeezing me. “No its not,” I whisper, starting to cry for the first time since the car had hit me, “I just want my brain back but Peggy told me its gone forever.” As I cry noiselessly, the anger I had felt since seeing the first doctor dissipates, and hopelessness and despair take hold. Through my tears I squint up at a picture of David Byrne kicking a stuffed rhino that I had tacked to the wall. “When David Byrne kicks a rhino its art,” read the caption.
Even in my miserable state, or perhaps because of it, the clipping is just as funny as it had been when I first cut it out, Before. So maybe my brain is damaged, I think, and I can’t think clearly anymore. But emotions and inspirations remain untouched, I still have all the important parts of what makes a person whole.
Despite this, the realization of what had happened to me finally sank in. I stopped talking because I was scared I sounded like an idiot, and for the most part, I was right. I stopped looking people in the eye. I only spoke to my best friends, the ones who didn’t mind that I couldn’t help but act like a five year old. I became paranoid that everyone was looking at my face all the time, and never took off my sunglasses.
School was impossible. I had enrolled in one class before realizing I was actually brain damaged. Trying to pass that class was like trying to eat soup with a fork. I will never again make fun of people who are slow. It sucks to be slow.
7.Taming the Word Beast
I sit down in front of my computer and feel like I am in high school again. Words I had spent most of the last four years beating into submission now run wild again across the tundra of my mind.
I feel as though my throat has been ripped out, one of the only things I’ve ever felt confident and strong about. Now before reaching my mouth my thoughts must past though a slippery steep mountain trail that used to be an easy downhill ride.
These sentences do not contain the thoughts I want to give them because they have no words to brace themselves upon. The blueprint of sentence structure, paragraph structure, and paper structure have been left out in the rain, left soggy and faintly discernable. I read what I have written and I get confused. What was my point? I think I either lost it or it changed.
I need paper. I need to rethink and replot everything I thought I was ready to say. I need to read the damn book again. A paper that would have taken me an hour to contruct before now take four, and even then its confused and jilted. I cant fix it because I’m not exactly sure why my sentences don’t contain my thoughts. They’re like snowballs, my thoughts. I form them and throw them at the paper and they fall apart, the snow goes everywhere and melts. And melts. Electric boogaloo and melts.
The genie from Aladdin pops up from the hole in my brain and yells, “She can be taught!” “Ok,” I say. To spell. To speak. To return to old words.
The next year I enrolled in school fulltime and devoted more energy than I thought possible to my classes. I read all the books slowly and took extensive notes. Occasionally I would want to ask a question in class, but, still paranoid about sounding stupid, I never said a word.
The midterm exam for my upper division literature class consisted of three essays. It was the first major assignment I had to hand in and I slaved over it, hoping to god I could conjure up something that could make someone think I wasn’t stupid. The day the papers were returned, I noticed mine on the top of the stack. I picked it up quickly, not wanting anyone to see it, and noticed the second one was also my paper. I picked it up and realized the entire stack was copies of my paper. The teacher was handing it out as a good example.
I made it out of the lecture hall before I started crying tears of joy for the first time in my life. My teacher had no idea what she had just done for me. She had given me back my voice.
