Head Cases Micheal Paul Mason, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (page 1 of 6) Page 1 of 6

Book Cover for Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

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• The Many Faces of Traumatic Brain Injury
  From the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 2008. Transcript of the video.

In All Earnestness

Joshu earnestly asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”

Nansen answered, “The ordinary mind is the Way.”

— from case 19, The Gateless Gate

So much snow, so much snow. Melissa rode in the backseat, watching the night whirl white with its first snowfall of the season. As the car she rode in passed slower vehicles, the wheels pulled and crunched and slid against icy patches. The driver, a doctor named Darrell, wasn’t accustomed to Thunder Bay’s blizzards—he drove as if he were back home, hundreds of miles south. He, Melissa, and two other passengers had carpooled to a housewarming party together, and Melissa’s condo downtown was the first stop on the return home. She directed Darrell to take the next exit because it was a safer route.

Up ahead, on the hill, a pair of headlights flashed on and off again repeatedly. As the lights drew closer, Melissa could see the pair of lights sweep away to the left before reappearing moments later. The car ahead was lost in pirouettes, like a child’s top, awkwardly spinning out of control and careening toward their vehicle. Darrell didn’t have enough time to slow, but he managed to yell out to his passengers.

“Brace yourselves!” he cried.

Melissa lunged against her restraint and her hands flew instinctively around her face. Glass sprayed over coats and scarves. The impact pinned her, unconscious, in the backseat. The unbelted woman in the front seat crumpled under the dashboard. When Melissa awoke a few moments later, it was as though the whole of reality were occurring inside a snow globe. Everything was quiet and slow, so slow it might be death, she thought. She sat in the backseat and told herself that if she were dead, she wouldn’t be looking at the wreck through her own eyes, and yet she didn’t feel quite alive. Minutes later, though, the sense of life returned, along with pockets of sound and time and touch.

More than ten years later, Melissa Felteau’s world is still returning to her, bit by bit. She no longer concerns herself with its fragments. Melissa doesn’t long for the world she left that day; she is pleased, maybe even in love, with the world before her. For now, that world happens to be Ottawa, Canada, where she’s conducting research aimed at helping other brain injury survivors cope with their impairments.

When Melissa greets me with a hug at the airport, I see nothing of the woman she was supposed to have been before the wreck. I’m usually uncomfortable around type-A corporate executives—the competitiveness and the moneyed optimism is all too much. Melissa radiates a warmth independent of station and geography. She’s overly bundled in a camel hair overcoat. With her blonde hair and rosy cheeks, Melissa looks like the friend you want to call after good news or a hard day. Right away, you get the impression she is on your side.

We have a break before her research group meets, so we walk around a bit downtown and find a quiet restaurant for lunch. The brain injury is still there, but only when you’re looking for it. Melissa talks in loops, circumstantially, dancing near the topic. She tells me that the driver in the other car began wandering the scene barefooted and dazed, and she likes this place because the food is great but the waiters are delicious. An off-duty emergency responder pulled over and offered a hand—remind me to tell you a story about him, Percy, the responder, I saw him years later, she says. Percy said that there were wrecks all over town and to expect a long delay for an ambulance. Thunder Bay is so rural, you know. The woman under the dashboard, Darrell’s poor, poor mother, was making a wretched noise each time she exhaled, causing everyone to wonder if the following breath would be her last, so, no, I did not focus on myself. Darrell was hanging halfway out of the car. Percy made a quick assessment of the scene, and when he noticed me sitting calmly he put in a call requesting priority service. I was in the worst trouble: I didn’t complain of any pain.

The more Melissa talks, the tighter the loop gets, as if her brain is working to reel itself in. After a few minutes, she’s locked on topic. Knowing the extent of her injury, it’s an impressive feat.

“I kept going within and within,” she tells me. “I felt less able to breathe, like I was fading away.”

First a fire truck arrives. A fireman hops off the truck and begins diverting the traffic for the ambulance’s arrival. Another fireman looks into Melissa’s eyes and straps an oxygen mask to her face. When the ambulance finally appears, forty-five patchy minutes have passed. Melissa watches calmly as they strap her to a spineboard and immobilize her neck. In the ambulance, they grimace as her vital signs weaken. A tech tells her to hold on for five more minutes, and she does.

The buzz and brightness of the emergency room jolts Melissa awake. In a matter of seconds, she is stripped nude. One breast looks as though it has been ripped off, and X-rays reveal four broken ribs. Her abdomen is swollen from internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen. Get her stabilized, go, go, go. Melissa is injected, bandaged, and whisked away, and anything that might have happened to her brain is a mere afterthought. She had survived, she would be fine, she tells herself.

Melissa spends Saturday spraying vomit into her bedpan and vehemently denying anything is wrong with her. She laughs and cries and rages within moments of one another and complains that she cannot see the ceiling. Her parents, exhausted from the overnight vigil, wonder how much morphine the doctors have given Melissa to cause her to act this strangely. Eventually, a resident on his rounds takes notice and schedules lab work and a consultation with a neurologist for Sunday, just to be sure.

From Head Cases by Michael Paul Mason, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Michael Paul Mason. All rights reserved. To view or the book, go to www.amazon.com. For more information about author and brain injury case manager Michael Paul Mason, go to www.michaelpaulmason.com.

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