On Writing

[maccaj]

A break, much needed, from the drudgery of moving and the seemingly endless nature of sorting a lifetime of things, trying to weigh that which no longer holds meaning against things which hold meaning only to us, and whether the latter are worth keeping any more than the former. I am Famine Irish stock, born of a mother whose own mother lived out

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[maccaj]

From the book:

In medical school I have been befriended by an upstart neurologist, who believes I am acting out a great lifelong falsehood. Adah’s False Hood. In his opinion, an injury to the brain occurring is early as mine should have no lasting effects on physical mobility. He insists there should have been complete compensation in the undamaged part of my cerebral cortex, and that my dragging right side is merely holding on to a habit it learned in infancy. I scoffed at him, of course. I was unprepared to accept that my whole sense of Adah was founded on a misunderstanding between my body and my brain.

But the neurologist was persuasive, intimidatingly handsome, and the recipient of a fabulously coveted research grant. Mostly to prove him wrong, I submitted my body to an experimental program of his design. For six months he had me stop walking entirely, in order to clear my nervous pathways of so-called bad habits. Instead, I crawled. With the help of friends I rearranged my small apartment to accommodate a grown-up baby, and warily crept each morning from a mattress to my coffee maker and hotplate on the kitchen floor. I used only the lower half of the refrigerator. To preserve my dignity I went to work in a wheelchair. I was starting a rotation in pediatrics at the time-good luck, since children don’t tend to hold the crippled responsible for their infirmities, as grown-ups do. Adults listen to you with half an ear, -while the Biblical prescription “Physician, heal thyself!” rings in the other. But children, I found, were universally delighted by a doctor with wheels.

At home, while I set about memorizing the flaws in my carpet, my body learned to cross-coordinate. One day I felt the snap like a rubber band that drew my right leg up under me as my left arm moved forward. A week later I found I could easily balance on my hands and toes, push my rear end up into the air and fall over into a sit. Nobody was there to watch, praise be, as I spontaneously clapped my hands at the wonder of my accomplishment. Within a few weeks I had strength enough in both arms to pull myself up on the furniture, and from there I could release myself to a stand. Now, tentatively, I toddle in a straight line. I have taken each step in its turn. I was not learning it all over again but for the first time, apparently, since Mother claims I did none of these things as a baby. She insists I lay on my back for three years crying for Leah to stay close and play with me, until finally one day without prelude I rolled off the couch and limped after her. Mother says I never practiced anything but always watched Leah, letting her make the mistakes for both of us, until I was ready to do it myself with acceptable precision. Mother is kind to me, probably because I’ve stayed nearer at hand than her other children. But I disagree. I made plenty of my own mistakes. I just made them on the inside.

See? It's not remotely *bad*... with a more deft hand, it could have been brilliant... but the *totality* of recovery (detailed extensively later in the book) ruined it for me. It's one thing for the predominant *theory* to have been that brain damaged kids just "learned it wrong" and experienced spontaneous healing of brain damage but clung to their own patterns out of stubbornness or fear... but apart from the fact that I don't think that *was* the predominant theory by 1970 (and it certainly wasn't novel or a theory to be held by an "upstart" by then), just because it was the theory doesn't mean it should have *worked*... not to the extent it's portrayed, at any rate.