I continue to exercise but instead of running and cycling, I mostly walk in the nearby woods in the early mornings and late afternoons. I go shopping with Mirek, holding on to him tightly, afraid to get lost, afraid to fall. My legs are not holding me up as they should; my balance is off. The world around me is swaying, coming in and out of focus. I am not sure of the reason: Is it in my brain or body? Is it mental or physical? I cannot tell. The two are inseparable.
But I can write and work day and night without a break. Steroids fire me up, just as they did in January when I was recovering from brain surgery. Once again I am like a manic person, a woman possessed, a highly driven insomniac. Since I can’t drive, I work from home. I hold long teleconferences with my colleagues, write reports, reply to e-mails, plan experiments, fill out administrative forms, make arrangements with morgues to collect brains for our studies. I can do these things, but it takes a lot of effort. I forget words and tasks. My own brain is still out of order—dotted with horrific craters, enveloped in clouds of inflammation. I swim in and out of the real world.
But as the days pass, I have more and more moments of clarity. I don’t know what’s happening inside my brain but the swelling must be receding because my mind is returning. I start to realize that I’ve been through something very strange, a bizarre and unusual odyssey. Slowly, I also begin to understand where that journey has taken me: into insanity, and now back.
As if from some previous life, as if from the deepest fog of perception, images of my recent past begin to emerge. I’m regaining my hold on everyday life and on reality. It’s like I’m clawing my way up from a black hole and slowly beginning to recognize my surroundings and see the sun. And I’m starting to realize how deep that hole was.
I ask Mirek and the children about the past weeks, how I behaved, what I said, what was different about me. They aren’t eager to talk. They share as little as possible. They are traumatized by my alien behaviors and the still-looming possibility of my death. And they are afraid that the pretender version of me—the mean one who criticizes them relentlessly, who is distant and unloving and confused and angry—might return.
But sometimes, they tiptoe into testing what I recall, to see whether I have any idea of what the past two months have been like for me—and for them. Witek brings up our walk to the pharmacy not long ago. “Do you remember it, Mom?” he says. “That you couldn’t recognize that fallen tree that you’d just spotted half an hour earlier?”
At first I don’t recall anything.
Was I even there? When did it happen? Was it really me?
I focus and close my eyes. I strain my brain and squeeze my eyes tighter, and as I do, I begin peeling away layer after layer of my own forgotten life. I can smell the wetness of the storm and visualize our stroll along the sidewalks strewn with branches and debris.
The motto that adorns the main hallway of the Georgetown University Hospital pops into my mind: We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in. It speaks strongly to me, and I whisper to myself, “Through my broken brain, the light starts getting in.”
The memories of the past two months begin creeping back. Like scared little critters who’ve been hiding in the corners of my mind, they begin to emerge, testing the ground first before peeking out cautiously from the folds of my beaten brain. With effort, I can recall the bare facts and see the things my family mentions: the tree branch, the sidewalk, the damaged car. I start recalling more events.
Strangely, however, I cannot fully resurrect the emotions of that time. It’s much harder to recall how I reacted and what I was feeling. On the infrequent occasions when my family tells me about something odd that happened, I listen carefully but cannot connect the factual description to the turmoil they went through. I don’t remember any of that. It’s as if my emotional memory resides somewhere else, someplace to which I still have no access. Maybe the feelings were never encoded in my brain at all.
Mirek asks, “Remember that awful dinner after we picked you up from the hospital? You were breaking my heart with your empty eyes, frozen facial expression, harsh words. You were so mean, so cold.”
I try hard to recall. I ask about the details—what I made for dinner that night, where we were sitting, who said what.
“Kasia and I got up from the table and went into the kitchen to cry. It was unbearable to see that you were not your normal self. We thought you were gone forever,” Mirek says, and he chokes with emotion. “You reminded us of Kai, the little boy from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Snow Queen.’” My husband’s eyes fill with tears.
I strain my brain again, and the images emerge as if from a movie I’d watched years before.
Yes, the dinner, I remember. I was cooking and it was not coming out as I expected. There was something weird about that dinner. But what? Was I distant and cold? Did they cry; were they sad? I don’t remember. Maybe it happened to another me, another person entirely?
I do, however, remember the story of the little boy named Kai. The tale terrified me when I read it
