When I could not speak, I did not use the time wisely. I did not contemplate the limitations yet absolute necessity of language. I did not explore how people compensate for lack of verbal capability with gesture, facial expressions, body positions. I did not meditate in quietude, nor did I accept my muteness with a knowing that my aphasia would resolve and the use of my right hand would return, if a bit cumbersome still, years later. I did none of those things.
I now understand that the state in which I existed for ten days and the months that followed was the low hum of panic; a foundation of fury buried under the mortar of anxiety. Resistance, alternating with acquiescence. But never acceptance. Like so much of my life until then and for years after, not acceptance.
When I could not talk, it was not because I had contracted the common form of streptococcus in my respiratory system. Nor did I have laryngitis, the kind I suffered as a teenager after screaming at hockey games. When I couldn’t talk, it was because a blood vessel or capillary in my brain closed up, spasmed tight as an unsprung bud. That vessel – one of myriad vessels along the route from lung to heart and on – cut off oxygen to the part of my brain that enabled me to not only think of language and choose words, but actually make my mouth form them. Since the left side of my brain experienced the trauma, my right arm and hand were paralyzed.
The year was 1994. After six years of auditioning for regional theater and commercials, I had given up constantly have to choose between buying groceries and paying rent. If truth be told, acting was a lot of hard work with little reward for the schmoozing that passed as an audition. Young, immature, impatient – I did the next rational thing and decided to become a best-selling author. After a bad breakup I found a new man. And although I wasn’t in love with him (our relationship always felt paternal or familiar rather than passionate or romantic) he supported me in my quest to find a creative voice that worked. A therapist kept encouraging me to write. So off I went to the local community college for creative writing courses, the first of which I was completing when I had the stroke.
“Stroke” is a word I have never understood as it is applied to that brain condition that kills people or steals much of their physical and mental capabilities. A stroke. With which swimmers propel themselves. Golfers keep score. The cam in an engine moves. Crew teams soar. Boxers win. Abusers instill fear. A clock tells time. Batters are out. The Universe bestows luck. A pen removes a word. A lovers caresses. In the 1590s, an apoplectic seizure was referred to as The Stroke of God’s Hand. The word implies mechanical movement, testament to language’s imprecision that a physical phenomenon that freezes activity is called a stroke.
In retrospect, I should not be surprised by the irony that I lost the ability to speak at the time I was trying to find my voice. If a person wanted to get all metaphysical about it, it makes perfect sense. At the start of my Hundred Years of Therapy, I went to explore another creative outlet – and started a new job working for a woman whose management style was all about stifling me. Of course I lost the ability to speak and write. Of course I lost language.
Not only did I not have the words then, I hardly have the words now. It is something that I share rarely. People look at me differently when I share that I’ve experienced a condition that generally afflicts old people. Only old people have strokes, and then they lose their minds, drool onto their housecoats in a ratty nursing facility, unable to move, speak, understand or care for themselves until they die. Old people have strokes and can’t talk, can’t feel their mouths, don’t know they’re spitting food on the personal they’re talking to. So I had no words. I still have no words. Until, much like the time in 1994, all of a sudden, I did. Some synapse, some impulse, some new pathway formed and language for this experience finally came.
I asked my father recently what he remembered about that December and the following months. He paused – looking for the words? – finally admitting, “Not much. I had my hands full here.” He said it with both apology and defiance. What his hands were full of was unapologetic defiance in the form of my mother, who, ironically, had been suffering strokes, probably since her 40s. Often snappish and short tempered, my mother complained frequently of headaches. I can picture her brushing – rushing – past me on the way to the medicine cabinet for buffered aspirin (why buffered? did she take so many that the medication hurt her stomach?) her eyes looking straight through me. When she was finally diagnosed with hypertension, her blood pressure was so high it couldn’t be measured. She spent a lot of time on the couch, watching ball games, mostly the Minnesota Twins, shouting at Killebrew, mocking Pete Rose when they played the Red Sox. “Oh, he’s such a … You’d think that they wouldn’t get so big.” The judgment, “Oh, he’s such a…” Such a what? “Such a …” became the ultimate criticism. “Such a …” was a fabulous way to get us kids to fill in the blank. “Oh, don’t be such a …” What? Whiner? Baby? Loudmouth? Chatterbox? For me, being called a Such A usually had something to do with shutting up.
No comments:
Post a Comment