Dear Lit Loves,
Initially, a young woman named Lauren who is in the first year of a doctoral program in theater joins two friends, one of whom has written and stars in a play, on a trip to a theater festival in Edinburgh. The author leaves her home in New York to travel to Paris to visit a former professor and then join her two friends for the festival and play in Edinburgh. The three friends retreat to Priscilla's bar to relax and one friend signs both Lauren (the author) and Laura (the friend who wrote the play) to participate in a karaoke contest. Lauren and Laura step onstage and begin to sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" when suddenly Lauren drops to the floor and falls off stage. She is rushed to a hospital in Edinburgh where it is determined she has experienced a brain aneurysm whereby an artery wall in the brain weakens and ruptures causing internal bleeding. A surgeon and other doctors rush her to surgery and place coils inside the area of the aneurysm to stop the bleeding. This is a quite dangerous surgery resulting in its own serious side effects.
Once Lauren awakes after surgery she first notices a profound quiet. People are speaking to her and about her, but she does not really understand much of what they are saying. She picks up a magazine and realizes it is difficult to focus and recognize words. This is when we learn Lauren is suffering Aphasia which is the impairment of language. Aphasia affects a person's ability to produce or comprehend speech and quite often also affects the patient's ability to read or write. Naturally, the two friends who accompanied her on the trip to Edinburgh are at the hospital with her and realize that something is most definitely not right with Lauren's speech, recognition skills, and comprehension ability. Her parents soon arrive from California and remain with her for weeks as she works to heal not just from surgery, but also recapture her language and comprehension skills with a speech pathologist at the hospital. Eventually, her boyfriend who is on a wilderness trip in Alaska appears in Edinburgh and she does not know what to make of him or their relationship. She also has difficulty intuiting what others might feel or think from their words or body language when she attempts to discern how her mother feels about Jonah, her boyfriend.
Eventually, the reader sees Lauren and her mom return to New York to retrieve some of her personal items and then Lauren goes to live with her parents in Los Angeles. She begins by going to see a speech pathologist to help with her word recall, writing, and reading skills. Being at home with her parents and her grandmother who lives in a house behind them proves somewhat overwhelming especially when her younger brother, Mike, returns home to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The abundant activity inside the house makes her yearn for the first days in the hospital when it was just quiet in her mind with no real way of expressing herself or understanding others remarks to her.
Eventually, she begins to recall a few words. Then she attempts writing those words and then reading them. It is a tedious but rewarding process she builds upon by writing in her journal and via conversations and interactions with others. She slowly but surely builds her vocabulary as well as writing capacity to be able to read an entire book. Still, she often has trouble with idioms like "Don't burn your bridges". The reader additionally sees her work to evaluate the previous status of her relationships with others. Was Jonah a good boyfriend? Were they in a relationship of content? Why does it feel like her brother is interacting awkwardly with her? In essence, she also has to learn to "read" people once again.
Upon Lauren discovering that her father has been sending emails to her friends, acquaintances, and family about her progress following the aneurysm, the reader sees that Lauren does NOT want her father speaking for her so she has him cease writing and sending email updates. This indicates her previous status as quite an independent woman. Later we learn that she had an apartment, life, and friends in New York and rarely interacted or visited with her family in California. She had been enrolled in a doctoral program that came with a teaching fellowship. When her mother begins to inquire about disability benefits for Lauren, Lauren learns a friend in New York had signed her up for unemployment benefits without her knowledge. Lauren then receives a bill from the state of New York along with a letter saying she has defrauded the state of New York. She gives this information to her mother who takes care of the issues.
Six months following the initial aneurysm surgery in Edinburgh, Lauren goes to a hospital to have an angiogram completed to ascertain how well her brain is recovering. It is here where she learns that the brain artery that ruptured is widening once again and the coils that were utilized initially to stop the bleeding are refilling with blood and will not completely keep her from experiencing another aneurysm once again. The neurosurgeon during this visit recommends clamping the artery closed to prevent any further rupturing of the brain artery. Lauren's parents accompany her for this visit and then insist they will get a second opinion from another neurosurgeon at another hospital. That second neurosurgeon keeps the family waiting for over four hours and when he does make an appearance, he is brusque with a distracted attitude. He tells Lauren obviously she needs another surgery to prevent another aneurysm and she should just go and book the surgery with his scheduler. This experience leaves Lauren conflicted about which neurosurgeon to choose from at two premiere medical hospitals.
Interestingly, once she selects the surgeon to perform the next craniotomy, her surgery goes well but with some complications. The neurosurgeon and his team not only had to clamp the injured brain artery but additionally utilize cotton balls and superglue because the artery had widened to the point where a clamp was not large enough to keep the artery closed. We then learn that although Lauren was afraid of this surgery due to the risky nature of it, she does not lose the gains in language and comprehension she worked so hard to regain after the first surgery.
Eventually, Lauren returns to New York and realizes Jonah is not exactly truly ready to take care of her even though he insists he is. She learns he was not always true to her when they were dating. And she sees that the people subletting her apartment have essentially trashed it and it no longer feels like "home". Also, she does not believe she can return to the pace of the doctoral program in which she was once involved so she and a friend box up her belongings from the apartment and ship them to her parents' residence in California. She will leave her life that she once had in New York and go to reside with her parents in California.
Ultimately, we see a young woman stricken with a critical medical issue most people encounter when they are much older. We see her slowly scratch, claw, and push her way to regain much of the language and comprehension abilities she essentially lost following the aneurysm in Edinburgh. What I liked most about what Lauren learns via this rare and ongoing medical issue is that the people who often say, "All is as it should be" or "Everything happens for a reason" to individuals who suffer a medical setback such as an aneurysm and aphasia are quite often the ones who have been spared from any form of unexpected, dire suffering. And Lauren realizes that language became both her injury following the aneurysm as well as the treatment to recover from that injury to her brain.
I absolutely love the ending of this book, but will not give it away in this review. I highly recommend this book as a fellow memoir writer and person who has been dealt her own fair share of unexpected and critical medical diagnoses.
Best,
Grace
(Amy)
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