Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury Lynsey Calderwood, Jessica Kingsley Publishers (page 1 of 2) Page 1 of 2

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• 
  Meet Sabrina — a teen talking to other teens about her experience after brain injury. From Lash & Associates Publishing Training Inc. Used with permission. For more information on this entire video, go to www.lapublishing.com.  Transcript of this video.
• Personal Story: Teens Talking to Teens
• 
  This is the story of a girl named Logan who persevered through her brain injury to create a magazine for other kids with disabilities and inspire them to achieve their dreams and goals. As featured on Bizkids. Transcript of this video.
• How to Succeed in Biz-Ness by Really Trying (Logan's Story)
• 
  From Every 21 Seconds or Why I Scream at the Refrigerator. The story of 8 survivors of traumatic brain injury. © Laura Napier Productions 2005. Used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information, go to Doug Claybourne’s Website, and to Aquarius Productions for information on this video. Transcript of this video.
• Every 21 Seconds - The Story of 8 Survivors of TBI

Chapter 1: How I Felt in the Beginning

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 5

I didn’t even recognize my own face in the mirror. Nothing felt right. Dazed. Paralyzed by fear, my first instinct was to run but I had nowhere to hide. Pain exploded like fireworks behind my eyeballs and there was a sizzling in my skull like a chain saw. I tried to speak but I had a knot in my throat and my tongue felt thick and woolly. I was terrified I was going to choke. Voices echoed, ricocheting across the room. I wished they sounded familiar.

I felt like an infant. Of course, I didn’t fully comprehend how this brain injury had changed me; I only sensed that my life would never be the same. I remember crying, feeling alone and being defenceless, but only for a day. I recall an anonymous nurse who held my hand in comfort while I begged so frantically for my memories. This part of me was dead, yet I was fighting to resuscitate it.

I remember feeling totally anonymous. I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened to me. I remember crying, feeling isolated. I was no longer the child my mother gave birth to. I did not feel like HER. I was HER reflection but I felt too ambiguous to be a real flesh and blood person. However, on the outside I still looked like their daughter. I still looked like a normal average teenager. There were no bruises or fractures, no bandages around my head and no magic wand to reveal my imperfections.

When they dressed me up in HER clothes and showed me HER photograph, I thought she looked just like me too. That’s when I began to feel threatened. Her shadow was beginning to haunt me and my family was trying to reincarnate her through me. I felt belittled by this overwhelming, overbearing ghost and everything that held a candle to her. It was as if I’d stepped through a mirror and here I was: the evil twin.

I’d been cheated. Cheated of my childhood. It was HER. It was all HER fault. SHE was the one. I blamed HER for my lack of memories. I HATED HER.

* * *

My glassy stare penetrated the mirror as I glared defiantly at the girl who wasn’t me. I studied the intricate indents of her inanimate face: vacant blue eyes, red-ringed and swollen; pink-red lips, drawn together in a childish pout; even the little dash mark scar I had acquired as a child — where I fell through the glass coffee table — didn’t belong to me. The series of curves joined in the middle to form a nose wasn’t mine either.

I sniffed. The nose twitched and I jumped back like a startled rabbit. The me that wasn’t really me followed suit, so we began a game of copycat: I raised my eyebrows, so did she; I raised my hand, so did she. Going faster, I tried to trick her into making a mistake; finally, I lashed out, tried to punch her in the stomach.

AAAH

She blocked me. That hurt. I stared hard at her but I couldn’t break her gaze. Her eyes were wild and angry; she looked like she hated me almost as much as I hated her.

I didn’t want to be here. All I wanted to do was go home but, somehow, I’d stepped through the mirror and we’d switched places. I was trapped in a land of reflections.

* * *

Fourteen years of stuff and nonsense, an autopsy of Lynsey’s life. I wrestle with my mind because it feels like it is no longer attached to me. I feel like I’ve been shoehorned into an alien body. I shuffle through old papers and photos in random order like some private investigator. My memories have no structure. They are completely dislocated.

I’m actually breaking into a sweat, fighting my lazy, sedentary brain. One of the few things I have learned is that I lack hindsight. I have no understanding of past events. I’m trying to organize all HER junk. I keep looking at the photographs and then the days melt together and then I forget and do it all over again.

* * *

I keep looking at the photographs and then the days melt together and then I forget and do it all over again.

* * *

I look at the pin-ups on the walls, the soft toys and the bedcovers I did not choose. I feel bitter when other people try to impose HER memories on me. I want to put it into words but there are no words to express clearly how I feel.

I have to remember the name of her sister when she comes back into the room.

But I never could remember. I wore my new identity like a child playing ‘dress up’. Later, when I learned and explored my limitations, I could only ache for what I should have been. I was completely afraid of life, other children, myself. I couldn’t understand just how much I had changed, how much my whole world (especially my body) didn’t belong to me: I don’t even know my own face. I don’t even know my own body.

Maybe if I lose some fat, I’ll find myself within the flesh. I wonder what I really look like? Being the second Lynsey means I already feel like I’m second best.

I want to be invisible.

I want to disintegrate into a pile of dust.

I just want to disappear.

* * *

They say I look like my father. Her father. The father is lean with a thick crop of startling raven black hair. He looks younger than his forty years. The mother is short and plump, she has a kind face and soft pink cheeks. The sister is a cute button nosed ten-year-old with flaxen blonde hair and a peaches and cream complexion.

They are all strangers.

Most children go through a phase of gradual disenchantment whereas I had adolescence thrust upon me. My life seems so short and my memories so infantile that I feel like I know nothing whatsoever. As far as I’m concerned I was born in November 1992 (the day of my accident) and whatever happened in the world before that is a mystery.

‘I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?’

Excerpted from Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury by Lynsey Calderwood. © 2003 Lynsey Calderwood. Reprinted with permission from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Third-party printing prohibited. For more information, go to www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781843100652.

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