The Ghost in My Brain by Clark Elliott Read Free Book Online

retrieve even one of them sufficiently to be able to form the necessary words.
    The doctor asked me, “Do you know what your name is?” I could see, in my mind’s eye, the words “Dr. Clark Elliott” in black type against a white rectangular background, mixed case, in Times New Roman font. However, as soon as I started to speak the answer, the words disappeared. But the vocalization had only just started. Without the words before my eyes, my motor system failed, and I could not speak them. At this point I also found myself unable even to decide whether the answer was “yes” I
knew
what my name was—after all I could see it in front of my eyes—or “no” I was unable to perform what is known as the
speech act
of saying my name in response to the question.
    In the end I just sputtered.
    I was so frustrated that my eyes filled with tears. I felt that the doctor assumed I was just an idiot. I felt like I was faking itsomehow, in a perverse scheme to emphasize my troubles. But I was not an idiot. I knew exactly what was going on (sort of, in one way). I just couldn’t communicate it. I wanted to have the doctor understand my symptoms, and wanted to be an active participant in treatment, but was completely shut out of the process.
    Much later, when they were ready to discharge me, the doctor simply said, “Everything looks fine.” I asked him, “What’s the problem? I don’t feel right.” He said, “You have a concussion, and it’s a bad one.” I remember seeing the words “severe concussion” written on a form.
    The doctor told me I could go home, then left. They gave me some papers, which turned out to be instructions telling me to have someone wake me up several times at night, but I didn’t read them until months later. I didn’t know what they were, I was living by myself, and besides, by this time I had found that I couldn’t read. They gave me some pills, but I didn’t know what to do with them. (I discovered the bottle of Vicodin in a drawer, unopened, a year later.)
    It would have been extremely helpful to have some explanation given, carefully, of what a concussion was. That is, something such as, “You have permanent brain damage and it is going to take some time for your brain to rewire itself to work around the trouble so that you can start to function more normally. In the meantime—for months—you might expect to have a lot of trouble getting through the day.” But no such explanation was given, and I was simply given my clothes and released. It took me several hours to make the one-mile drive home.
    By the next morning my arm was quite sore. By Sunday it was swollen to twice its size. The hospital staff had forgottento take the catheter out of my arm before releasing me. It would have been easy for me just to take the tape off and pull the catheter needle out, which any reasonable person would have done. But I couldn’t make sense of it: my arm hurt . . . it was swollen . . . I had been in the hospital. . . . For some reason there was tape and a plastic connector, with a big needle sticking in my arm. I couldn’t figure out how to get the tape off. The best I could manage was to drive back to the hospital emergency room one-handed and bang on the glass door with my good arm.
    It was after midnight, so the overnight guard sent me in to the nurses’ desk. The nurse there laughed when she saw my arm, and others of the night staff, standing around the nurses’ station, looked over our way, and started laughing too, at my expense. I was the big joke that night—too goofy to realize I had a needle sticking in my arm. I felt both helpless and ashamed to be such a dope with my swollen arm. My sense of isolation was growing.

WORD MAPS GONE AWRY
    By this time, because the experiences were so odd—and, in a macabre way, fascinating to me as an AI