It Took Six Years for Me to Say Two Words

After a major car accident 17 years ago, Judith Hannah Weiss learned that some things can be replaced, but your brain isn’t one of them.

Artwork by Judith Hannah Weiss

You might wonder how it feels to wake up one day and not know who you are. I don’t know. I don’t remember. 

I learn I was hit by a drunk with a truck. I learn she ran out of beer for breakfast, stole a truck and ran out for more. I learn she compressed a parked car. I learn I was in the car. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn’t my life. It was 2006, I was 56, and the good news was I survived. But the bad news was brain damage. I learn and forget this a few hundred times.

I’m not an expert on brain injury. I am a person who has one. Those three words are rarely seen together, “Person. Brain. Injury.” Here’s what that means: I got a new life. With a mind of its own. 

There are other problems, too. Like I’ve done things I can’t say with people I can’t name in places I can’t describe. This is called aphasia. The part of the brain that allows you to speak and write is about the size of a penny, as in a penny for your thoughts. Other spots just as small let you recognize your child, your mom, your home, your hand. Or not. 

When the brain breaks, the legs don’t know what to do. Neither do the hands or arms. You can’t see the curb. You can’t feel your feet. You don’t own your mind, your body, your life. I woke up with my head in a helmet studded with electrodes. Probes punctured my scalp to survey my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, you name it; there was a probe for the lobe. 

Grief is losing someone who was close to you. Brain injury is losing someone who was you.

Traumatic brain injury achieved a moment of fame when former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Once in a while my swollen brain coughs up pieces of my past. In my first life, I wrote copy for icons and editors like Elmo, Martha Stewart, and a Devil Wears Prada or two. In fact, my clients owned Oprah and Martha and Mickey and The Little Mermaid and Kermit the Frog.

In media, everything fits together perfectly – by the line, image, and second. You can snap together cities, robots, rockets, model planes and model brains like Lego blocks and keep them together as long as you like. That was then, this is now. 

The odds of a sinkhole opening within me are approximately equal to the odds that I’ll find the right word at the right time. I shoot from one self to the other, then slam back and forth with the predictability of a pinball and with the same sense of grace. 

Amnesia made nothing out of countless somethings I knew, forgot, then learned again. Aphasia did the same to words. Chewed them up and spit them out. Aphasia acquired a moment of fame when Bruce Willis acquired it. 

Imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them. Then imagine you are trying to speak and no one can understand you. I try hard not to say things like, “in one swoop fell,” when I mean, “in one fell swoop.” Then I try hard not to say, “when this sky is bending down and tying his shoe,” when I mean “when this guy is bending down and tying his shoe.” 

Two residents are assigned to my case.  I can’t comprehend names but can remember mannerisms — one keeps exhaling her bangs off her forehead in to the air, the other one keeps pulling his sleeves. The bang-blower asks if I know why I’m here. I point to my head. Maybe I want to say, Someone ran out of beer. I can’t. Maybe I want to add, She was drunk, but not as drunk as she wanted to be. 

I lost a piece of my mind and sometimes it shows on my face…It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say.

Amnesia can take anything and make it disappear. I don’t know what’s on my mind. I don’t know what’s in my mind. I don’t know what I am thinking. I point to a chair because I can’t say “chair.” I do the same with a shoe. I mime drinking from a bottle because I can’t say “I’m thirsty” or “water” or “drink.” 

The sleeve-puller arrives. This time I just point to my head. Maybe I’d like to say, “My name is J. I used to have a name with more letters, but that was before the accident.” Maybe I want to add, “Access routes blew up. There’s no bridge, but I need to cross the river, no airport, but I need to land, no road, but I need to get to Amtrak, no Amtrak, but I need to catch a train.” 

Picture two groups of people on any subject. One is the group of experts who know it backward and forward. The other is the group that “doesn’t know it at all.” They’re the same people, only they’re brain-damaged now. That’s why we’re in Brain Training. There's a lot to get right. To impale a word, then to impale another word to that word. To tweezer a word like a tiny gem, then tweezer another, stringing them like beads so they make sense. 

A top doctor asks if I have any concerns. That seems almost funny. Maybe I want to say, “My brain launches like a missile somewhere it’s not meant to go.” When I don’t speak, she asks again if I have any concerns. Maybe I want to say, “I can’t talk or walk or read.” Maybe I want to add, “It’s hard to read when letters rearrange themselves within words.” “Bananas” becomes “sananab,” while “We hold these truths to be self-evident” becomes “tnedive fles eb otshturt eseht dloh eW.” 

The sleeve-puller returns and asks how I am. Maybe I want to say, “I would give a billion dollars to know what’s inside my head. And a billion more to know what was there before.” Maybe I would add, “Grief is losing someone who was close to you. Brain injury is losing someone who was you.” 

One tester asks me to put the hands of a clock on three. Then she tells me to put time on a line. My chest feels tight, my eyes feel hot. I can only half-concentrate on what anyone is saying. My head is busy breathing and trying to arrange my face so I don’t look like I’m in pain. I am both the disabled mind and the mind that exists aside from it. And I can’t put time on a line.

Things happen and then are forgotten as if they haven’t happened. Or they are scribbled on scraps, then forgotten, as if they haven’t been scribbled on scraps. The tester – seeming a bit testy now – tells me to push a lever. The right lever or the left. Letters clump into words and words lump into thoughts if they stay long enough to lump or clump. The tester clenches his teeth. 

In cartoons, people like me are hilarious, especially in the scenes where skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, frying pans, and coconuts on craniums.

I lost a piece of my mind and sometimes it shows on my face. I pray that it won’t, but I know that it does. It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say. In cartoons, people like me are hilarious, especially in the scenes where skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, frying pans, and coconuts on craniums. 

The sleeve-puller arrives, this time to “take essential history.” Maybe I want to say, “It was taken by a truck.” Or maybe I want to say, “In my first life, I was a writer. Stuff I wrote paid the bills.” But they want a credible history. Mine isn’t, because most people don't have one life working with icons and legends, and a second life caused by a drunk with a truck. Nor are most people amnesic, which also affects credibility. A doctor arrives. She says something about not wanting to pressure me. That almost seems funny. She adds something like I can decide what I want to know, or how much I want to know, or when I want to know it. That seems almost funny, too. There are holes in any landscape. Gaps where words should be. Sometimes I say something right.

The teeth-clenching tester asks me again to push a lever. The right lever or the left. This will help quantify what is left of my right brain. I am listening with everything I have. I am doing everything with everything I have. And it’s not enough. It takes six years for me to say “brain-damaged.” I prefer “head-injured,” which sounds external or cosmetic, like a malfunction of mascara or gloss that strays just a bit past the lip. Not terrifying or stigmatizing like “brain-damaged.”

A torrent of present, past and future shoot in and out of my skull. Like projectiles. A tester asks me to name the months of the year. I say October or Tuesday or Mary or May. When that doesn’t work, I try March, parch, penny and dime. I spend nine weeks or nine months or nine years pretending I know what someone is talking about. I don’t know what anyone is talking about. 

About one year in, or one year out of my old brain, I began trying to read a book. I read the same pages hundreds of times. This went on for two years. If I began where I’d left off, say on page 5, and found the character was on a train, I had no idea why she was on it or where she was going.

I spend nine weeks or nine months or nine years pretending I know what someone is talking about. I don’t know what anyone is talking about. 

I began scratching scraps of anything I recalled on any surface I could find – coffee cups, coffee stirrers, paper plates, Popsicle sticks – then stashed them in brown paper shopping bags, which I forgot for years. At first I wrote just a few words, brief like fortune cookies. No upper case or punctuation, so as not to pause and lose a word. 

I sometimes see myself from a distance, as someone I know, but not well. Or as someone I knew in another life. In my first life, I built roads and bridges with words. I parked one word next to the other and they stayed where I put them. A short description of something that happened, laced with something funny or fierce, then maybe something like what it might mean. In this life, things appear, then disappear. Have names, then don’t. 

Someone is next to me. No, no one is next to me. A meal somehow floats into a room. Someone must have brought it in. There’s a fragrance, too. It belongs to a woman you used to know or a woman you used to be.