My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Once she arrives at Massachusetts General Hospital, the author feels completely weakened and compares herself to a deflated balloon. The rushed pace of treatment annoys her, and her doctors’ and nurses’ demands are overwhelming. Their “touching, probing, and piercing” feel like an assault to Taylor, who faints (64). She later awakens, surprised to find that she is alive. Feeling tired and confused, Taylor cannot surmise where her own body ends, and the rest of the world begins. It is painful for her to see light and to inhale, and she covers her face with a sheet to escape the light. She is also unable to hear and cannot remember details of her life. She observes her doctors and colleagues discussing her CT scan while she inwardly thinks about how her mind and body have become useless to her spirit. With her left brain unable to influence her thoughts, her right brain wants “to escape this vessel of physical form, which radiated chaos and pain” (66). She regrets surviving.

When her physicians try to interact with her, Taylor feels irritated at her calm and blissful experiences being interrupted and is anguished at being unable to communicate with people. Without her brain maintaining her identity’s narrative, she does not feel a sense of “obligation” to being herself (67). While Taylor is aware enough of her body’s losses to grieve her current situation, she is also relieved at being able to let go of her past identity and the negative memories it contained from her upbringing. She also feels free from her stresses and responsibilities. In this mindset, Taylor continues to envision herself as fluid and unseparated from others, reducing her feelings of loneliness. While Taylor acknowledges that this experience sounds frightening, without her left hemisphere there to create a judgment about it, it feels natural to her. This phenomenon also influences her vision, as things around her look more pixelated, like a pointillism artwork, and without three dimensions.

Taylor wonders how she will ever function in society with her current fearlessness and awareness that all of us contain the “power of the universe” (70). She feels that, in hindsight, her old identity had been a product of her imagination. 

Taylor is admitted to Neurological Intensive Care, where groups of doctors and nurses attend to her. She has very little awareness of her situation and surroundings, and she experiences people as “concentrated packages of energy” (74). Although she cannot understand what people are saying to her, she registers their tone and body language; some nurses and doctors make her feel cared for by speaking kindly to her, helping her eat and drink, asking her questions, and touching her. However, when her interactions lack this warmth, she feels unsafe. In hindsight, Taylor feels that the largest difference between her pre-stroke and post-stroke brain was the dramatic silence that she experienced in her mind (75). She still thinks with her post-stroke brain, but instead of favoring words and linear thoughts, she visualizes pictures and observes situations, “taking time to ponder the experience” (75).

Answering factual questions is an immense challenge for Taylor, who struggles to focus on people’s voices and comprehend their words. She likens this experience to straining to listen on a phone call with a bad connection. When her doctors ask her “Who is the president of the United States?” Taylor uses all her concentration to remember what a president is—and what the United States is—but cannot recall the specific politician Bill Clinton, “despite hours of probing and exhausting mental gymnastics” (77).

Taylor is frustrated by her doctors’ attempts to evaluate her level of brain function and knowledge with such challenging questions. She knows that she still has plenty of information in her brain, but relying only on mental images creates a challenge for accessing it. She wants the medical staff to figure out how her brain is now functioning rather than subjecting her to strict criteria that reflect the expected functioning of a pre-stroke brain. Reflecting on her experience of encountering the world with dulled sensory perceptions and an abundance of big- picture thinking, the author asks the reader if they experienced this feeling of “swimming in a sea of euphoria,” would they want to go back to a linear, regular routine (79)? Taylor’s colleague Steve calls her mother, G.G., and informs her of her daughter’s stroke. The author hints that her mother, who already had experience coping with one child with mental illness, would go on to become an essential part of her recovery process.