How I Rescued My Brain

by David Roland

  Andrew has been looking at his watch off and on, and, once Craig has introduced himself, says, ‘What’s going on? We were meant to start the meeting at ten o’clock. It’s now ten twenty-five. They’ve had weeks to prepare for today. What are they playing at?’

  We wait another five minutes or so, and then Simon gets a call. I think it’s about the case, so my ears prick up when his voice gets noticeably louder. But instead I hear him say, ‘Well, when I put the washing on the line this morning, it wasn’t raining. I can’t predict when it’s going to rain. What do you expect me to do about it? I’m in Sydney … Look, I’ll see you tonight.’ He snaps his phone shut and says to none of us in particular, ‘She expects me to be a weather forecaster!’

  Finally, there is movement from the conference room opposite. The door opens and out comes a thin man with a beaked nose and heavy, square glasses. He says he is Mr Tsanov, the barrister engaged by the insurer. Simon introduces each of us in turn, and we shake hands. Tsanov gives me a second’s worth of eye-gaze — no smile — and a short hello in a plummy, resonant voice. Following in his wake is a woman who almost curtsies in deference behind him, and who is introduced as the insurer’s in-house lawyer. Her expression when introduced to me is sympathetic; I wish we were dealing directly with her instead.

  All six of us sit at the long conference table. I am at the head, with Tsanov to my left, and his assistant lawyer in the next chair along. Andrew is off to my right, with Simon the furthest away. My large support person sits in the wedge of space between Andrew and me. Tsanov has insisted that if Craig is to be present during the conference, he is not allowed to speak. We have no choice but to accept this condition.

  The barristers square off with each other, and although it is an informal conference, I can see them mentally putting on their wigs and gowns, adjusting themselves to sit taller in their chairs. Tsanov searches silently, unhurriedly — all eyes on him — through a folder of documents resting on the table. Then he leans forward, as if seeking intimacy (his tie bent by the edge of the table, eye contact only with Andrew), and, without any preliminaries, asks, ‘What is your client’s position … what is he seeking?’

  Henceforth, I become invisible.

  Andrew refers to a sheet of paper, naming each item in my claim, like an old-fashioned greengrocer with a list on a notepad, written with a pencil grabbed from behind his ear. Unpaid monthly benefits from this date to that date, interest, costs, refund of paid premiums, and interest on interest. He cites the dollar amount of each item, and finally, looking to Mr Tsanov as if expecting immediate payment, announces the grand total. Tsanov gives this summation a moment’s disdainful consideration, bows his head to look at his documents again, and the real tussle begins.

  I have already decided that I will tune out during most of the conference and maintain a look of equanimity. I think I know how this game is played, based on stories from past clients and from television shows: the other side’s lawyer tries to agitate you, needle you, and catch you out in some way.

  ‘Your client’s claim has a number of flaws, I’m afraid,’ Mr Tsanov begins. His tone sounds reasonable, even considerate, but the import of what he is saying has a growing malevolence about it.

  ‘To suggest that Doctor Somerville, a clinical psychologist, is a medical doctor is absurd. I’ve looked at the registration requirements for medical practitioners in this state …’ he intones. He’s referring to Wayne. I reassure myself that Andrew will deal with all this. As Tsanov continues, I notice the thinness of his long neck, with its protruding Adam’s apple that moves skittishly as he speaks. Along with his small head and the thick glasses that magnify his eyes, I can’t help but imagine a turkey. As I mentally withdraw from attending to the meaning of his words, his speech begins to sound like the gobble, gobble of a turkey.

  I build a life story for Turkey Neck. I imagine that he attended a private boys school, spending his lunchtimes in the library looking up reference or special-interest books. He was probably a member of the chess club, and no doubt excelled on the debating team. Now I’m receiving the brunt of his debating skills. With his slight frame, average height, and glasses, I imagine he avoided the parts of the school playground where the sporty boys hung out. I envision that basketballs, thrown ‘accidentally’, would some-times hit him on the side of the head, knocking off and breaking his glasses, and they would need to be patched up with tape until he made it home and got his spare pair, his parents resigned to ongoing optometry bills.

  Now, Turkey Neck is looking and sounding like an old-time headmaster chastising his pupils: so confident, so superior. He is taking my legal team to task. ‘Of course, the logic of your argument is ridiculous. Doctor Roland has clearly managed his own affairs and has not relied on a medical practitioner’s directions at all. He didn’t even mention his condition to his GP for at least a year and a half, and yet consulted him on a number of occasions for other ailments.’ As he says this, I see him, out of the corner of my eye, glance towards me, as though to determine if his remark has provoked a reaction from me. I remain impassive.

  ‘I don’t want to insult Doctor Roland’s intelligence,’ he says, and then goes on to detail — in that tone of reasonableness — how unintelligent I have been.

  What’s going on? This is supposed to be a negotiation. Andrew had told me that we were invited to a settlement conference; he didn’t say it was going to be adversarial. But Turkey Neck is having a good old poke at my claim, and is barbecuing my legal team in the process. He rummages around in our box of arguments, picks up each one, and holds it at arm’s length with pinched fingers, as if saying, You mean this is an argument, this fragment? and then drops it back into the box. I feel like squeezing his turkey neck.

  My team looks off-colour. Andrew spits out short retaliations now and then, and occasionally rises to launch a salvo. But I can see that he is rattled, and his retorts are smothered by Turkey Neck’s words. He is leaning back in his chair, like someone facing a barking dog. Simon, although not directly in the line of Turkey Neck’s assault, exhibits similar body language.

  Turkey Neck refers to a letter that apparently says something that disadvantages my case. Simon says, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I’ve seen that.’ He flaps through his folder of documents, the size of the city telephone directory, as if somehow the offending page will float out — magically, as in Harry Potter — into his hands. After a few minutes of flapping, he says, ‘I can’t seem to find it. I’m not sure that we’ve received that.’

  At this, Turkey Neck’s expression seems to say, I thought as much … total incompetence.

  As my confidence in my legal team wanes, I let go of the idea of strangling Turkey Neck — it’s stirring up a disconcerting feeling of anguish. I tune out again. As far as Turkey Neck is aware, I remain unmoved, staring out the window at the end of the room. Fortunately, I can see a large patch of perfect blue sky. In my mind, it becomes the blue of the ocean. I am swimming in the bay near home. I can see turtles and fish, and feel the sand, gritty in my bathers, as I stand up in the surf after being tossed around by breakers while coming into shore. My friends are there, the sun is out, and I feel all right.

  I’m brought back when I hear the barristers declaring that they’ll take a break and have a private conference because ‘Doctor Roland is probably tired out’. I do welcome this, and the barristers and solicitors trundle off to the other conference room while I’m left alone with Craig.

  Craig says that he is not in favour of adversarial tactics: it puts the insurer offside. Taking the insurer to court, as I have, makes them less willing to negotiate. But I did not have his advice before. He acknowledges that there’s no point in dwelling on it. He suggests a compromise, which sounds reasonable to me. I agree, and make a note to discuss it with Simon and Andrew.

  But before they come back, I change the topic of conversation. I’m sick of talking about legal complexities
, and I’d like to get to know a bit about Craig. Somehow, he gets onto telling me that he is a Remote Area Firefighting Team volunteer. I haven’t heard of this before. ‘It’s a specialist unit with the Rural Fire Service. We go where normal fire vehicles can’t get in. We’re dropped in by helicopter.’ He explains how they set up new fire fronts to fight the existing one.

  ‘What sort of training do you need for this?’ I ask.

  He says that because they fly in helicopters, they need to be prepared to land in water. The fire service has a metal compartment the size of a helicopter cabin, and they drop this into the swimming pool used at the Sydney Olympics. When a helicopter lands in water, it can turn upside down, so to prepare for this, the volunteers are strapped into the compartment before it is dropped into the water upside down. They don’t have oxygen tanks, so they rely on holding their breath while they extricate themselves from the compartment and swim to the surface.

  ‘This isn’t easy,’ he says, ‘and it plays with your mind. Some can’t handle it. The key thing the instructor told us was that we have to know how to exit the compartment before we land in the water. We have to have our hand or arm on the exit lever before we crash, because under the water — in most conditions — you can’t see in front of your face.’

  As he is describing this, I’m aware of a growing sense of discomfort. I’m being transported into my nightmare, where the family and I are driving in the failing daylight, and the van runs off a bridge and into a river. What he has just told me confirms that I would not be able to see the children in the back seat. I could not even know exactly where they were. I would have enough trouble trying to get out myself, without trying to help them. In my dream I could see them, and I would struggle to free them from their seatbelts, pushing them out the door to the surface. But with what Craig has just told me, they would surely drown.

  I thought I had dealt with this nightmare in therapy, put it behind me. But here it is, stalking me again.

  I’m shaking, and I don’t know if Craig notices. I have to get out of the room. I interrupt him and say that I have to go out for air. There’s no one in the waiting room. I grab a glass of water and stand by the window. We are sinking into the river, the water is pouring in through the windows and the gaps of the car, and now I can’t see the kids. This is bad. My chest is heaving. My breath is coming in waves. I try to jemmy the drowning images out of my head. I breathe and breathe and breathe, willing my breath to slow down; I press my face against the window, drinking the water slowly and hoping the chill of it will bring me back to the present. It’s not really happening. You’re in a lawyer’s office. You’re all right. It’s daytime.

  After a while, the images and the physical sensations of the nightmare loosen their hold. It’s like being on a train that is slowing down as it comes into the station, and the snapshot view of the platform through the window lasts longer and longer. The view of the skyscrapers through the glass begins to last longer, becoming more solid, and finally fixed. At last, I really do feel I am in the waiting room of a high-rise building, in the office of a legal firm, with a turkey-necked barrister who wants to squash me. And the thought of returning to do battle with him isn’t as gruesome as the nightmare.

  After my legal team has knocked heads in ‘secret lawyers’ business’ with Turkey Neck and his sidekick, they emerge from the second conference room. Andrew declares, ‘It’s useless. We didn’t come here to debate the case, but to settle. We’ve wasted our time. We may as well all go home.’

  All this trouble for nothing.

  TO MY RELIEF, the calls between Simon and Turkey Neck start the next business day. Turkey Neck is finally in the mood to settle. Simon rings me almost every day, telling me with excitement that Turkey Neck has raised his offer, and we discuss a counteroffer. I imagine Simon and Turkey Neck as two medieval knights jousting, their telephone receivers their lances.

  I wonder why we have to play this silly game. Why doesn’t the insurer just say what dollar amount they are prepared to go up to, and we can either accept it or not? In the end, it will cost the insurer much more to play this game than if they had been reasonable with me in the beginning, before the lawyers got involved; and I will get less out of the settlement because of the legal fees I’ll have to pay. The only winners are the lawyers.

  Some days later, we get an offer. It is at the bottom end of the range of what Simon and Andrew thought we could achieve. I have to accept it. It is two-thirds of what we were claiming, and when I get my lawyer’s bill, I’m left with two-thirds of this amount again. The money will allow Anna and I to meet all our loan repayments and expenses for the next six months or so. After this, the battle for financial survival will start again.

  AT THE START of April, some better news arrives — in the form of my Brain Fitness program, which turns up in the mail. I’m eager to get started. I need to get my brain working again; I’m not going to get out of this mess without it. Anna says she has no time to do the program, so I’m on my own.

  For optimum results, Posit Science recommends the completion of forty hours of training over eight weeks — five days a week, one hour per session. On the first day, I only manage thirty minutes; after this, rubber brain threatens to overtake me. The next day is the same, as is the following. This shows me that I’m working to my limit. At this rate, it’s going to take me six months or more to complete it.

  The program concentrates on building the basic auditory skills first (pitch and phonemes), and then the components of speech (syllables and sentences), and finally comprehension (narratives). It contains six different exercises, which I work through progressively. The first, ‘High or Low’, trains for pitch in speech, drawing on the frequencies found in spoken consonants and vowels. It does this by frequency sweeps: a computer-generated sound begins low and rises in pitch, or begins high and lowers. It’s a sound like a zipper being opened or closed quickly. I listen to the pairs of sweeps in my headphones. I have to decide if each sweep in a pair has gone upward or downward, and use my mouse to click on the correct sequence of up and down arrows on the screen. The program picks up on my progress, making the sweeps quicker and reducing the time gap between them. The brain needs to be pushed beyond its current limit to improve. I quickly reach my threshold, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the sweep is going up or down.

  The second exercise, ‘Tell Us Apart’, uses phonemes — the individual sounds that make up words. In the word ‘dog’, for example, there are d, o, and g sounds. The program presents similar-sounding phonemes: for example, the sounds ‘dah’ and ‘gah’. The sounds are hard to tell apart. I perform very badly.

  The program notes indicate that the voice saying the phonemes has been modified to alter the speed at which the phonemes are said and how much emphasis is put on the consonant. A faster speed and less emphasis makes it harder to tell them apart. Some phonemes are easier for me to work out than others. For some reason, my brain finds certain consonants harder to process than others. This shows me why I find the comprehension of others’ speech, such as that of the lawyers, so tiring: my brain is working overtime, trying to make sense out of fuzzy engrams.

  There is one exercise I enjoy. ‘Match It’ is like the card game Memory. A matrix of cards is presented facedown on the screen. Each card has a syllable associated with it, and within the matrix there are pairs of syllables. Some of the syllables are dissimilar in sound: for example, ‘baa’, ‘fo’, and ‘pu’. Other syllables sound similar: for example, ‘sho’, ‘stu’, and ‘sa’. I am allowed to click on two cards, one after the other, and hear the sounds they represent being spoken. I work my way through the matrix, activating each card to find the pairs. This is training my working memory for spoken words, with a spatial-memory component. The matrices increase from eight to sixteen to twenty-four to thirty cards. I excel at ‘Match It’, compared with the other exercises; it’s encouraging to still be good at something.
Perhaps it shows that when I can use my visual memory, it aids my overall memory.

  As I progress onto the larger matrices, I notice that I can let go of mentally rehearsing the sequence of sounds I’ve just heard. Instead, when I click on a new card to hear a sound I’ve heard before, I let my mouse hand drift over to the card that ‘feels’ like the match and click on this. Most often, it is correct. Somehow, my subconscious processing has become faster and more accurate.

  I’d love to spend more time doing the ‘Match It’ exercise, but the Brain Fitness program, like a good teacher, soon learns my weak areas and focuses on the exercises that most challenge my brain. One of these is ‘Sound Replay’. It presents syllables such as ‘baa’, ‘fo’, and ‘laa’ as a memory-span exercise, asking me to remember a series of such sounds, as if I am learning a list. The voice names a random sequence of syllables, starting with two and then moving on to three, four, five, and more. I need to indicate which syllables were said, and in what order. This is training my capacity to discriminate sounds and is building my auditory working memory. It reminds me of the paired-words test I did with the neuropsychologist. Like then, I do poorly on this exercise — the sounds quickly enter the fog. I can only remember two syllables, and occasionally three syllables, for a long time.