Prognosis
Page 26
“Do you remember who I am?” I asked my mother during a recent visit.
“Are you my sister?”
“No. You don’t have a sister.”
“Are you my mother?”
“I’m Sarah,” I said, and squeezed her hand.
She laughed and shook her head. “You’re certainly not Sarah.”
Perhaps she was right.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would never have started this book without the encouragement and support of Xu Xi, the founder and director of the MFA program at City University in Hong Kong, a program, sadly, that no longer exists. Sincerest of thanks are due to Robin Hemley, Suzanne Paola, Ravi Shankar, and Justin Hill, and to my fellow students in the program, most particularly Sophie Monatte (my closest writing buddy), Mags Webster, Jacinta Sweeting Read, Adnan Mahmutovic, Andrea Brittan, and Rebekah Chan. Two of my favorite writers, Shannon Cain and Rawi Hage, provided me with invaluable advice on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and I am grateful to them both. Thanks are also due to friends who have read all or part of this book at some point: Kira Legaan, Michelle Leung, Nick Avery, Warren Cahill, Brooke Green, Vedna Jivan, Justin Hocking, Phil Glist, and Amy Shea. Big thanks to the support provided by the team at Little A: Emma Reh and Merideth Mulroney, as well as Michael Townley, Chad Sievers, and Zoe Norvell.
A number of literary journals published essays of mine that appear in this book in slightly different forms. They include the Gettysburg Review, the Sun, Two Thirds North, the Pinch, Post Road, Bellingham Review, and the Asia Literary Review. My thanks to them all.
Special thanks and love to Helena Hu, a gem of a friend, who read multiple versions of this book, and to my beloved wife, who patiently read every iteration and draft. Without you, this memoir would have ended bleakly. Thanks also to my previous two long-term partners, “Laura” and “Giulia,” for putting up with me for as long as you did. I would also like to thank my psychiatrist and my neurologist, without whom I probably wouldn’t be here. I hoped Sofia, my much-loved dog, who sat patiently at my feet while I wrote this book, would live to see its publication, but sadly she did not.
Finally, this book would not exist without the wisdom, kindness, and patience of my agent, Sarah Levitt, and my editor, Laura Van der Veer. I cannot thank them enough.
ENDNOTES
1 In the US, between 2001 and 2005, there were five activities in which traumatic brain injury accounted for greater than 7.5% of Emergency Department visits for that activity. The five include horseback riding (11.7%), ice-skating (10.4%), riding all-terrain vehicles (8.4%), tobogganing/sledding (8.3%), and bicycling (7.7%). American football accounted for 5.7%. J. Gilchrist, K. Thomas, M. Wald, and J. Langlois, “Nonfatal Traumatic Brain Injuries from Sports and Recreation Activities—United States, 2001–2005,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 56, no. 29 (July 2007): 733–37.
2 BBC, Leeds Press Office, “Inside Out Reviews Dangers of Riding” (March 23, 2007), http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/03_march/23/riding.shtml.
3 Years later, someone will tell me I suffered a coup-contrecoup injury. That happens when a moving object (one’s brain) smashes inside one’s skull when it collides with a stationary object (in my case, a rock). This ricocheting within the skull is what causes brain damage. The coup part occurs at the initial site of impact, and the contrecoup on the opposite side of the brain to where the initial impact occurred.
4 My mother was lucky. In the US, from 2003 to 2012, equestrian sports accounted for the majority (45.2%) of all sports-related traumatic brain injuries. E. A. Winkler et al., “Adult Sports-Related Traumatic Brain Injury in United States Trauma Centers,” Neurosurgical Focus 40, no. 4 (April 2016): E4.
5 See for example, C. Prince and M. E. Bruhns, “Evaluation and Treatment of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: The Role of Neuropsychology,” Brain Sciences 7 (8), August 2017. The authors also describe the differences in diagnostic criteria of mild traumatic brain injury, as determined first by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and later the World Health Organization.
6 In 2001, eight years after my father died, a book launch was held for Nature’s Investigator: The Diary of Robert Brown in Australia, 1801–1805. Two of my father’s colleagues in Britain who shared his interest in Robert Brown had finished the book. See Nature’s Investigator: The Diary of Robert Brown in Australia, 1801–1805, compiled by T. G. Vallance, D. T. Moore, and E. W. Groves (CSIRO Publishing, 2001).
7 Institute of Medicine, Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury: Evaluating the Evidence (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
8 Y. S. Su, A. Veeravagu, and G. Grant, “Neuroplasticity after Traumatic Brain Injury,” in Translational Research in Traumatic Brain Injury, eds. D. Laskowitz and G. Grant (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor and Francis Group, 2016).
9 S. J. Redpath et al., “Healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards traumatic brain injury (TBI): The influence of profession, experience, aetiology and blame on prejudice towards survivors of brain injury,” Brain Injury 24, no. 6 (May 2010): 802–11.
10 “TBI: Get the Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified April 27, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html.
11 M. I. Medved and W. Hirst, “Islands of Memory: Autobiographical Remembering in Amnestics,” Memory 14, no. 3 (April 2006): 276–88.
12 J. Strizzi et al., “Sexual Functioning, Desire, and Satisfaction in Women with TBI and Healthy Controls,” Behavioural Neurology 2015, Article ID 247479 (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/247479.
13 M. Nagasawa et al., “Oxytocin-Gaze Positive Loop and the Coevolution of Human-Dog Bonds,” Science 348, no. 6232 (April 17, 2015): 333–36.
14 V. Rao et al., “Aggression After Traumatic Brain Injury: Prevalence and Correlates,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 21, no. 4 (October 2009): 420–29.
15 D. Goleman, “When Rage Explodes, Brain Damage May Be the Cause,” New York Times, August 7, 1990.
16 The law was relaxed in 2015 to allow short-term visits. The ban on long-term visits for HIV-positive people entering Singapore remains.
17 M. A. Linden and I. R. Crothers, “Violent, Caring, Unpredictable: Public Views on Survivors of Brain Injury,” Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 21, no. 8 (December 2006): 763–70.
18 The law was changed in 2007 to permit oral and anal sex between consenting heterosexuals.
19 G. W. Rutherford and J. D. Corrigan, “Long-Term Consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury,” Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation 24, no. 6 (November–December 2009): 421–23.
20 R. Ruff, L. Camenzuli, and J. Mueller, “Miserable Minority: Emotional Risk Factors That Influence the Outcome of a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury,” Brain Injury 10, no. 8 (1996): 551–65.
21 K. A. Gorgens, “Women and Mild TBI,” Spotlight on Disability Newsletter, December 2014, https://www.apa.org/pi/disability/resources/publications/newsletter/2014/12/women-brain-injury.aspx.
22 Z. Kou and A. Iraji, “Imaging Brain Plasticity After Trauma,” Neural Regeneration Research 9, no. 7 (May 2014): 693–700.
23 M. J. Hylin, A. L. Kerr, and R. Holden, “Understanding the Mechanisms of Recovery and/or Compensation Following Injury,” Neural Plasticity 2017, Article 7125057, https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/7125057.
24 Since I wrote this book, a test to identify CTE has been developed by researchers at UCLA and is available for trial, although it has not yet acquired FDA approval.
25 A. A. King et al., eds., Historical Perspectives of Rabies in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin (Paris: World Organization for Animal Health, 2004).
26 These are rough guesses. It is very difficult to be precise about the percentage of lesbians in any particular place as (a) people are not always honest about their sexuality; (b) there is a blurry line for many people between homosexuality and bisexuality, which may skew survey results; and (c) the surveys that have been done of
ten use questionable methodologies. In terms of introverts, it has been suggested that between one-third and one-half of all Americans are introverts. That seems a little on the high side to me.
27 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), vol. 2, 165.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Nicole Cooper
Sarah Vallance was born in Sydney. She graduated from City University of Hong Kong in 2013 with an MFA in creative writing. Her essays have earned her a Pushcart Prize. She has been published in the Gettysburg Review, the Sun, the Pinch, Asia Literary Review, Post Road, and Bellingham Review, among other places. Sarah was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard and holds a doctorate in government and public administration. She lives in Sydney with her wife and their three dogs and three cats. Prognosis is her first book.