On my desk, amid a large pile of documents, was a note that said, Welcome Sarah! Please read! My boss, who was fond of exclamation points, was traveling. Okay! Rita! I thought to myself. Will do! I sat down with a yellow highlighter pen and waded through the stack of papers.
The job turned out to be dull. And depressing. In my first few weeks, I broke the monotony by visiting as many nursing homes as I could. I preferred being out of my tiny office, although seeing so many old and dying people took a toll on my already fragile mental health. Reading about old people in government reports was one thing, but seeing them clinging to life and staving away death with what little strength they could summon was another. I drove for hours with the car radio on and the sunroof open. “I hope I die before I get old,” the Who sang as I drove over the Roseville Bridge on my way to the largest dementia facility on Sydney’s north shore.
I was right: nursing homes are a lot like prisons. The big difference is that most people get released from prison. And the prisons I had visited, the low and medium security ones, anyway, were a lot more fun. The mood was lighter, with hope—the vague prospect of a fresh start—in the air. I traipsed through retirement homes, hostels, nursing homes, and dementia facilities. I smelled horrible things. Things that people who are frail or dying or disabled shouldn’t have to smell. I saw disgusting meals served from old, scratched trolleys, and that same gray food nudged around plates. I felt an emptiness that ate away at my insides.
I greeted a lot of frail old people. I smiled at people who didn’t know where they were or who they were, rattling locked doors to escape, to find their way to a home they couldn’t remember. People who wept with frustration at being stuck inside a place where everyone around them was sick or dying. People who believed they were perfectly well, that their minds were alert. I saw people who couldn’t get out of bed. People who lay on a narrow bed in a room, within the same four walls with a window that looked out onto a parking lot or a row of dumpsters, until they died.
And then I saw the saddest thing: In a bed next to a man in his nineties, there was a young man of around eighteen whose motorcycle had collided with a truck. He had suffered a severe brain injury and lost the use of his legs.
I looked at him, and my heart broke.
How could it be that a head-injured eighteen-year-old was stuffed away from the world inside a nursing home? That could have been me. The sad truth was that there was nowhere to put younger people with brain injuries, so they ended up in facilities completely ill-suited to their needs. It’s still the case today.
Rita wrote nice exclamation-pointed comments on the papers I prepared for her and seemed to be quite happy with my work. One benefit of working alone was that I was able to labor over each of those papers without distraction, taking the time I needed, making sure they read well and made sense. I often took work home with me at the end of the day and spent hours writing and rewriting whatever it was I had written. Gradually it became easier. In any case, all seemed well with my job until the day Rita came into my office, dragged in a chair from the corridor, leaned across my desk, and said, “I need you to present a paper at a conference. It’s in a fortnight, and there will be the usual crowd of nurses and care workers. Probably about 150 people. I want them to get to know you.”
I suddenly felt ill.
Why didn’t she mention this earlier, I wondered? Since my head injury, my confidence had been zapped. The look on my face must have given me away.
“You don’t like public speaking?”
“I’m shy,” I said, “and to be honest, I’m not great at it.”
“But you had such a big job before!” she said.
“I never did much in the way of public speaking,” I said. And I wasn’t brain damaged then, I wanted to add.
“Look, I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I thought you couldn’t handle it,” she said kindly. “You’ll be fine. And I’ll be there if you happen to get stuck!”
I drove an hour and a half to Gosford to the aged-care conference with 150 delegates. Looking at the program, I felt my breakfast lunge toward my throat. I had been listed as a keynote speaker. I sat down in a chair at the back of the room and considered stabbing my neck with a ballpoint pen—anything to get myself carted out of the room. I willed myself to faint. “Pass out, pass out,” I chanted under my breath, but I had never fainted in my life, and I wasn’t going to now. I tried to think about anything other than what the next two hours held in store. Why do hotels and convention centers dress their chairs up in covers, I wondered? Is anyone fooled? I lifted the peach-colored polyester dress and uncovered a metal framed chair with chipped chrome and a plastic foam seat. For all its ugliness, I preferred the bare chair—and the irony was not lost on me. I had lied about my head injury. Hidden it. But what choice did I have? If I had been honest, I would never have found work.
A gaggle of nurses approached me and took turns shaking my hand, introducing themselves. I tried to smile, but I heard nothing. All I could think was that soon I would be standing on a podium in front of all of them, humiliating myself.
When I stood up in front of the crowd, I froze. Everyone in the room was smarter than me, I realized, looking out at 150 faces, heads tilted expectantly like George and Bess, waiting for me to speak. Inside their skulls were 150 high-functioning brains. Some of them had likely experimented with drugs, so maybe their brains were not perfect. But no matter how much coke they had snorted, how much weed they had smoked, how many packs of temazepam they had snuck out of hospital medicine cabinets and swallowed in the bathrooms at work, they were still smarter than me. It was a terrifying thought, but it was true. It was over before I opened my mouth. Thoughts shattered inside my head as I tried to read my presentation. Because I was nervous, my voice quavered and I spoke too fast, in a steady monotone. I could not disguise my terror. All I could think was, I knew this would happen. I warned Rita. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen.
I raced through to the end of my talk and stood back from the podium to catch my breath before the floor opened to questions.
Things only got worse. I fumbled around for answers to the questions they asked me and then gave up. “I’m sorry, I have no idea,” I said. My mind could think only of Toby, the psychologist at the Brain Injury Unit, and my inability to find the yellow circle. I was kidding myself to think I could do an office job. The neurologist had told me I would never be able to return to this type of work, and he was right. I was a fraud—a fraud who was about to be fired.
I wanted to race out of the room and never go back. But in my high heels and skirt, I knew I’d trip and make an even greater spectacle of myself. Rita stood up at the back of the room and answered questions on my behalf. My life was over. I would return to copying slabs of text into a writing pad and staring at the pockmark on my wall. They would pay me out, I hoped, for a full month. I was still in my probationary period. That would help cover the bills. Then I would start all over again.
Except none of that happened. Rita was nice about my failure, although a tad surprised. “How could someone with such a successful career be so, um, green at public speaking?”
I had no answer.
“How about you go to Toastmasters to overcome your fear of public speaking? I found it really helpful.”
I nodded.
I had no intention of going to Toastmasters and exposing another roomful of strangers to my damaged brain. I would be quite happy never to say anything to a group of more than three people for the rest of my life.
Back in the office, I approached Rita with a proposal. “I will write the presentations, and you can give them,” I suggested. She thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Okay.” She happened to be an excellent public speaker and seemed to enjoy the limelight. “I’m happy with that.”
I exhaled loudly as soon as I left her office. I’m not sure how, but I had made it through the first disaster of my working life and managed to keep my job.
5
&
nbsp; IMPULSES THAT WON’T BE CONTROLLED
The accident had left me with a panoply of subtle and not-so-subtle changes to my personality. Beyond the extreme chair-destroying volatility I’d acquired, the new me found it hard to think, hard to concentrate, hard to remember. Everything I had taken for granted before the accident was an effort. The new me was bedeviled by the knowledge that I was stupid. My personality had been sabotaged by depression and anger. I had trouble adjusting to my new life. I was party to an arranged marriage with someone I didn’t much like.
Following my accident, I had locked myself away from the world. My mother’s lack of interest in my welfare had hurt me deeply. What kind of monster must I have become for my mother to have abandoned me?
I was sociable, if shy, before my head injury and enjoyed the company of others. It usually took a couple of glasses of wine for me to become talkative, but I was friendly, I laughed a lot, and I loved nothing more than making others laugh. Alcohol had always been an important part of my social life, and my closest friends reported that I was a lot more fun after a few drinks than I ever was sober. I was not lacking in sharp edges—those who knew me well would probably have described me at times as dogmatic, stubborn, or even acerbic—but I had a healthy reserve of charm at my disposal. Postinjury, my charm vanished. So did my sense of humor. It didn’t seem like there was much to laugh about. I had no interest in seeing my former friends; doing so only reminded me of everything I had lost. I would rather be at home with George and Bess and a bottle of wine than out with friends or, worse, trying to make new friends.
I lost the art of socializing. I drifted away from people I had just met, unable to keep a conversation going. Soon after I got the job in aged care, a colleague who had done her best to befriend me told me I ran hot and cold. One moment I could be immersed in conversation, and the next I’d be in what she described as “shutdown mode.” I apologized and told her I was distracted by something in my personal life. That I hadn’t meant to be rude. In truth I had no idea how I came across to other people. That was why I tried to avoid them. When I relaxed, my mind wandered into cul-de-sacs, where the only word that accurately described my state was “stupefaction.” It would take a very patient and persistent person to become my friend.
My impulse control vanished. I acquired the frightening ability to speak before thinking, blurting out comments that were insensitive or rude. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. On one occasion I was running an errand in the center of Sydney when I saw an old friend from high school. She stopped me in the street and hugged me.
“Sarah! It’s so nice to see you!” she said.
“Maria! You’re supposed to be dead! I heard you had killed yourself!”
Which happened to be true. Another person I went to school with had told an old friend of mine that Maria had taken her life a couple of years before my accident. The words raced out of my mouth, and, as I heard them, I recoiled from myself in horror.
“That was my sister,” she said, looking me over with an expression that suggested I was either evil or crazy or possibly both.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, but the damage was done. I should have told her about my accident, about my problems with impulse control and my inability to hold my tongue. But I was hell-bent on hiding my injury from everyone around me. Maria walked away, and I never saw her again.
I wanted to find the nearest wall and bash my head against it. Perhaps that would help bring my old brain back. Instead I went home and shared my disgrace with George and Bess, and we cuddled on the sofa. I promised I would leave the house only to go to work.
Somehow, at work, the illusion of someone who was competent and professional held up. When I talked to people over the phone, I kept a notepad in front of me with a series of instructions I had prepared for myself that reminded me to SPEAK SLOWLY!, to LISTEN! and BE POLITE! As tedious as I often found my job, my sense of who I was and who I wanted to be was inextricably linked to work. Slowly I was climbing out from the bottom of a well, trying to rebuild my brain and my life. The job helped mend my battered psyche, and I couldn’t afford to screw it up.
I bounced back and forth between my tiny office and my home, minimizing my exposure to the outside world and concentrating all my efforts on preserving the reputation I was trying to build at work. My only company was George and Bess. I had plugged my phone back in for practical purposes, but I didn’t contact anyone. The only problem with my plan was an unexpected side effect from my injury: I craved sex, and lots of it.
Despite the paucity of interest in the subject, the research that exists suggests that most women with traumatic brain injuries lose interest in sex after their injury. One study that surveyed a sample of only twenty-nine Colombian women with traumatic brain injuries found that the majority had “reduced sexual desire, arousal, orgasm function, sexual satisfaction, and lubrication.”12 That wasn’t my experience.
As my brain began to mend, there was a shocking shift in my sexual appetite. In the past my relationships with men had tended to last for at least a few months. I had never had a one-night stand with anyone. After my father died, I traveled to the Greek isle of Lesbos and met a woman from Amsterdam. We spent two weeks together, and I realized there was absolutely no doubt about it: I was gay. So my exclusive interest in women after my accident wasn’t a huge revelation, but my attitude toward sex had changed dramatically. I no longer wanted to meet a woman and fall in love. Love and sex had become unlinked. I just wanted sex.
Before my accident, I had slept with three women. Maybe four. I had never met anyone in a bar. On the rare occasions I had attempted to enter a lesbian bar, I was turned away. The Sydney lesbian scene in the early 1990s was a tightly guarded community. Once, before my trip to Lesbos, I cajoled a friend from work to coming out to a lesbian club with me. The woman at the door ushered my friend inside but stopped me. “Straights are not allowed,” she said. My friend had been happily living with her boyfriend for five years. “How is she ever supposed to know if she’s gay or not if you don’t let her in?” she protested. “Not my problem!” the woman said, holding her arm out to forbid me from entering. The problem seemed to stem from my face. I look frighteningly clean-cut, and I could be mistaken for a Sunday school teacher or the wife of an evangelical preacher—the kind of person who should be home sewing doll’s clothes or baking gingerbread men for school fund-raisers, not trolling lesbian bars for a date.
So I had a problem: I wanted to be alone, but I also wanted sex. In order to have sex, I needed to gain entry into a scene that had consistently rejected me in the past. To get past the gates into Sydney’s lesbian bars, I needed a guide.
I gave in and called James, an old friend from my first job in Parliament House, and asked him to take me out. James was the first gay friend I ever had, and the only person I knew who was out at work. Everyone liked him because he had the courage to be himself. Impeccably dressed and fastidious about his appearance, he loved taking me aside and counseling me about my dress.
“Promise me you won’t buy any more clothes unless I’m with you,” he used to say, winking, as if to lessen the blow. It was true that I had no fashion sense whatsoever, and I stayed within the safety of navy, black, and gray skirts or trousers and striped or white business shirts, which I rarely bothered to iron. My appearance did not interest me in the slightest. If my colleagues hadn’t realized it before, they did the day I turned up to work wearing one black shoe and one navy one.
“Why don’t you ever wear makeup?” James asked me once. “Is it just laziness?”
“Partly,” I answered. “And partly because I have no idea how to put it on. I would look like a clown.”
“All you have to do is ask!” he said. “I could make you look gorgeous. If only you’d let me!”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean. More gorgeous.”
When I called James out of the blue asking him to take me out on the town, he couldn’t have been ha
ppier.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked as we flopped into two lounge chairs in a corner of the room in a bar on Oxford Street.
“I’m not sure,” I said, and I meant it. James hadn’t heard from me since my father died.
“Are things getting any easier?” he asked.
“No. I still miss him as much as I did when he died. I don’t think it’s ever going to get any easier.”
“It will,” he said, putting his arm around me. “It must.”
For most of our friendship, James knew me as a poorly dressed heterosexual. My recently found gayness was a source of mirth. He insisted I give him an intimate account of my limited history with women.
“Well, who would have thought!” he chuckled, leaning back in his chair. “You’re a lesbian!”
“I am,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “And I don’t want a relationship, just sex.”
“You want a woman solely for the purposes of having sex?”
“More than one, if possible. A small number would be ideal, so I can rotate them.”
“And they need to be pretty?”
I nodded.
He sucked air in between his teeth and looked around the room. “That might not be as easy as you think.”
The bar was empty but for men.
“You’d better not leave me and run off with someone,” I said. We sat and talked, and drank, and my induction into life as an out lesbian and a closeted brain-damage sufferer began. After about four hours and six Long Island iced teas, we were both drunk.
I stared into the dregs of an empty glass and came to believe that my real love, apart from George and Bess, was alcohol. The drunker I got, the less I thought about sex, and that could only be a good thing.
Prognosis Page 8