One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman Read Free Book Online

unawares, I found myself slipping into my naturalist’s way of knowing, coping by detaching myself enough to appreciate the ecology of the medical world I was traveling through, rather than being totally overwhelmed by it and drowned. No, this other sense of lost was what I needed. How coolly the brain obliges, and isolates, compartmentalizes, shifting its gaze from one hub of action to another, composing the tone poem of a different mood, when need be, or running a bold new face up the flagpole.
    Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence —whatever the label—it’s a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue. Linked neurons, firing like sparklers, make the sudden change feel seamless, and seemless. One network dims as another wakes to high noon. Both stay wired and ready to serve, like unheated spare rooms in a large old Victorian mansion. Why expose them all to scrutiny? Be rational about religion? Too scary; hide religion from critical thought. Apply human codes of ethics to how we treat animals? A slippery slope; don’t stroll there. Agonize nonstop about Paul’s stroke? It would fry the wiring; transcend if possible. Lose yourself in nature’s dens and crevasses, and turn the key on heartache. When you can’t, toss drop cloths over everything, lower the heat to save energy, and allow a sedated overseer to take charge. Drift on autopilot. Just go through the motions.
    As I continued down unfamiliar corridors, white-robed people, green people in green mushroom-shaped hats, and people pushing patients on beds all passed in slow motion. But in the firmament of fluorescent lights overhead, excited atoms were shooting electrons into higher orbits far from their home, where they paused for a tiny fraction of a second too quick to imagine, almost immediately tugged back down again. Falling toward their hub, the electrons released extra energy as photons of light. Walking down an endless hallway, I smiled glumly, feeling far from my own center.
    Everything about this Oz took getting used to: the uniforms, dialect, climate, food, geography, machinery, protocols, hierarchies, and low ambient sounds of whirring, squealing, gnashing, and incessant beeping. Stricken families were duty-bound to learn enough of its culture to speak with the natives and help a loved one survive. So it felt right that I needed to cross a bridge en route to the hospital, and another bridge walking from the parking lot to a set of space-age doors that saw me coming and sprang open, let me pause a moment inside a toasty vestibule, before the inner doors glided open, ushering me into a world apart, one with chilly corridors and overexcited atoms.
    A FEW DAYS post-stroke, Paul now seemed to recognize a spattering of words, yet he was still woefully confused. I kept waiting for him to rebound, but the signs were ominous as I played them over in my mind. He couldn’t read the newspaper or tell time by the large clock on the wall. He couldn’t drink without choking. He couldn’t do basic addition. When he tried to stand, he surprised himself by how wobbly he was. He needed to be retaught how to sit in a chair, use the toilet, work the taps in the bathroom, shave, walk without weaving or falling. The fourth and fifth fingers on his right hand had curled into a claw. But most of all, there was the aphasia. Although he was able to make some of his feelings known through facial expressions and gestures, he was frustrated and furious that no one could understand his gibberish when it clearly made sense to him. He didn’t know his own name or mine, and kept gesturing wildly that he wanted to go home.
    While I watched, Kelly, a petite and cheerful blond speech therapist, stood beside his bed and calmly tested his mouth and throat muscles, showing him by example how she wanted him to move his jaw, tongue, lips. The right side of his face still drooped, but he could stick out his tongue and push it around his mouth like a wayward