The Day My Brain Exploded Page 13

  5. Priest: I loved God, and there were lovely Hindu temples in Queens—only a subway ride away.

  Listing fantasy professions excited me. My future was wide open. It didn’t matter that I currently had no income. Although physically I wasn’t 100 percent perfect, I could see, hear, talk, and walk without cane or crutch. And I didn’t need a wheelchair.

  Still alive and with my functions fairly intact, I had been given another chance to relish the world, excluding the hell of public relations and including the heaven of tropical beaches. The world seemed to be mine, and I could grab it any way I wanted to. Such possibilities!

  I had never felt so delighted to have survived my brain’s explosion.

  Just When You Thought the Worst Was Over: 2002

  Fear in a Handful of Air

  Nothing is shocking; everything is shocking.

  I should have realized this vital truth in my life, after all of the surprises and twists and terrors I had so recently undergone. I shouldn’t really have been shocked by what happened following 2001—but I absolutely was.

  On January 19, 2002, Manhattan was pummeled by a large-scale blizzard. At eleven that evening, my friend Ringo and I were heading to a late dinner. Ringo, named after the most underappreciated Beatle, was a young, handsome black man, my age and height, with striking shoulder-length ebony dreadlocks. On Seventeenth Street and Sixth Avenue, I started to feel ominously ill. It was an unfamiliar, magnified mix of flulike exhaustion, head pain, feverish sweating, and severe nausea. I had never before felt this terrible.

  As the snow kept furiously bombarding us, I began shouting “Get a taxi!” to Ringo.

  I needed to go home, fast.

  Suddenly, I was hit with something greater than the severe sick feeling I had known before; I was now inhaling and exhaling a vile, invasive odor that seemed to envelop me.

  If death had a stench, this would be it: a repulsive, unbearable combination of car fumes, melted gunmetal, and burning rubber.

  Then blackness.

  I awoke in a hospital bed. Déjà vu. The ceilings were mustard yellow. This time it was not Prakash looking over me, but Ringo. His mocha face was warm and reassuring.

  I was more lucid than I had been after the wedding-day hemorrhage, and immediately I noticed I was again strapped to a bed. Next to Ringo stood a short, oddly oblong East Asian man who was more horizontal than vertical.

  “My name is Dr. Lee. You’re in Beth Israel’s emergency room. You’ve just had a massive seizure, so we’ve hooked you up to a strong anticonvulsant, Dilantin.”

  Sure enough, my left arm was pierced with a huge IV drip.

  “We don’t know what might have precipitated the seizure.”

  I told the story of my AVM and the brain bleed.

  “Ah,” Dr. Lee said in reply. “That probably explains it. Let’s give you a CT scan to see what’s up.” He led me from the room.

  As I returned, by myself, to the bed, Ringo jumped at me. “What’s your family’s number in New Jersey? I have to tell them!”

  I gave him the number, feeling as frightened as he looked.

  Mom was by herself when she received the call. Dad was in Berlin on business.

  “Mrs. Rajamani? It’s Ringo. There’s been a problem—Ashok is in the hospital!”

  Having just nursed me back from the long, long road out of hell, Mom refused to accept another medical terror.

  “Ringo,” she scolded, “it’s almost one in the morning. What an awful, disgusting joke. Why would you even say this to me?”

  He gave me the phone, informing me that Mom wouldn’t believe him.

  I took the headset, and told her that Ringo wasn’t joking. “Mom, it’s true. I’m in Beth Israel.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “But it’s all right, I’m okay.”

  “I’ll be right there!”

  Poor Mom. She was devastated, but fortunately, Prakash and Karmen were nearby, spending the weekend at a friend’s home in Newark.

  She called my brother, crying hysterically.

  “Don’t worry. Don’t cry, and stay calm,” he said on his cell phone. “We are coming right over—don’t even think of driving to the city. We’ll take you there.”

  As they were driving through the storm, Ringo told me about the events surrounding my arrival at the hospital.

  It turns out that he was so panicky that when the nurses asked him for my information, he gave them wrong answers.

  We were still talking when Prakash, Karmen, and Mom arrived, breathing heavily from their rapid trip. Shortly after, Dr. Lee arrived with his results. We looked at him nervously.

  “Got some good news and bad news for all of you.”

  I hated it when people said that. It always meant they only have bad news for you. Adding the “good” is just to soften the shock. And it fucking never succeeds.

  “The CT scan showed that your brain hasn’t changed.”

  He paused to deliver the kicker.

  “But the AVM scar has become a recurring irritant to the brain. It will provoke seizures from time to time. You’re epileptic.”

  Furious, Prakash spoke up.

  “Why did this happen after so long? Two years after the hemorrhage?”

  Dr. Lee didn’t even blink at my brother’s angry outburst, but continued calmly.

  “First, the surgeons were probably too concerned with the AVM brain surgery and keeping Ashok alive to discuss the risk of epilepsy. As for the long delay in having a seizure, it’s a textbook case. It’s called the ‘kindling effect.’ When the brain suffers a massive injury, it’s as if a wildfire has been ‘kindled’ in the brain.

  “After a long time, the flames—that is, the seizures—finally emerge. His hemorrhage left a scar. When it’s irritated, it affects brain electricity, and Ashok seizes.”

  Dr. Lee looked at Ringo.

  “Will you please describe, in detail, what happened during the night? We know it was a seizure, but I need to hear more specifics.”

  Ringo looked troubled, as if recounting the tale would hospitalize him as well. He sighed.

  “No problem, I’ll tell you.”

  Dr. Lee and my family leaned in closer as he began speaking.

  “When Ashok and I neared the restaurant, he looked really sick, dry-heaving and all that shit. He started shouting for me to hail a taxi. I kept asking if he was okay, but he didn’t respond.

  “He got real clumsy, like he was losing his balance totally. Then his body . . . his body . . . changed. That’s the right word. Changed.”

  “How, Ringo? How did it change?” Dr. Lee asked, the urgency in his voice betraying the calm he was attempting to convey.

  Ringo stopped speaking, distressed.

  “It’s okay. Take your time, go at your own pace,” said Dr. Lee reassuringly.

  After a minute, Ringo continued. “Ashok’s body suddenly clenched up. Hands and feet curved into claws, like a crab. His body totally hardened and became bone-stiff and rigid. He looked like a skeleton, like a fossil. He started to drop to the ground.”

  Mom looked down, shut her eyes, and covered her face with her hands.

  “I couldn’t let him hit the ground, and it looked like nothing would stop him from falling. So I grabbed his body with both my hands. And I held him up so that he wouldn’t slam into the concrete. It was frozen with ice, where we were walking.

  “His body kept jerking and thrashing and moving. I was so scared. I never knew a human body could ever become like that.”

  Ringo’s voice became soft.

  “The only thing I could do was hold him tightly as his body kept on flailing. I needed to call 911 but I had to use both my hands to hold him. Then, out of nowhere, I saw this white chick racing up the next street. She looked like she was in a hurry, wherever she was headed.

  “I yelled to her, ‘Please help me and call the ambulance!’ She was an angel. She used her cell to call 911. She told them what was happening and gave them the address. I thanked her,
and she sped off, no names exchanged. I was still holding Ashok. I didn’t know what to do because his dead weight was becoming heavier than I could hold.

  “Luckily, just then another person walked up to us. A dirty, raggedy homeless man. Poor guy, looked like he was completely drugged out. He carried an old newspaper and told me to calm down, told me things would work out.

  “Then he unfolded the newspaper, placed it on the icy street, and instructed me to lay Ashok down on it. Like he was making a bed for him.”

  Ringo choked up, forcing himself to maintain his composure.

  “The guy had nothing but that newspaper. But he laid it down for Ashok. Within five minutes, the ambulance showed up. And the paper guy walked away.

  “Two big guys, I don’t know if they were firemen or what, tried to lift Ashok onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. But I couldn’t believe what I saw. Ashok fought, punched, and attacked them. It took them five minutes before getting him in the ambulance and restraining him with straps.

  “During the entire time they forced him into the van, he kept crying out the same thing, over and over: ‘Help me God Help me God.’ ”

  Mom still held her head in her hands as Ringo finished speaking. Prakash and Karmen were visibly shaken.

  I was horrified.

  I remembered none of this.

  Finally, Dr. Lee spoke. “Thanks for telling us what happened, Ringo,” he said. “I know it was hard for you, but you did a great job recounting it. And you saved your buddy’s life.”

  Ringo nodded, attempting but failing to deliver even a small smile.

  Dr. Lee then gave us a cold, clinical explanation of what had happened. The distance in his voice was unnerving.

  Mom looked up, dried her eyes, and listened intently.

  “Ashok experienced a ‘tonic-clonic’ seizure, commonly known as the grand mal. It is the most severe of such attacks.”

  Thatta boy, Ashok. Always getting the first-place blue ribbon.

  “Tonic-clonics cause more fatalities than any other type of seizure,” Dr. Lee continued.

  “In a grand mal or tonic-clonic seizure, there are two parts. First, the person enters the ‘tonic’ state, where he becomes unconscious, falls, stiffens, and hardens completely. Second is the ‘clonic’ part, where he jerks forcefully. Then he becomes unconscious. This extreme, severe quaking is often too much for any body to tolerate, so these types of seizures frequently cause permanent injury. Or they simply kill.”

  Dr. Lee looked directly at me.

  “Ashok, you should go back to Jersey and recuperate with your parents for a while. I want you to see an epileptologist there. I’m familiar with a great one named Dr. Silvie; she’s over in Jersey City. I’m also prescribing these Dilantin pills; you have to take four daily for the next three weeks.”

  “Three whole weeks?” I said, surprised by the lengthy period.

  Little did I know that I would eventually have to take anticonvulsants for months. Years. The rest of my life.

  Dr. Lee wished me well and left.

  After an hour, Ringo left for the subway to get home. It was still snowing around five a.m., when Mom, Prakash, Karmen, and I left the hospital. Karmen stopped first at Casa Ashok to pick up some of my belongings, before we headed to Jersey.

  I thought I had found freedom in New York City, but obviously freedom didn’t want me just yet. So back to the parents’ home I went.

  The next afternoon, Mom and I went to see Dr. Silvie for a referral for a epileptologist closer to my parents’ home. A sixtyish white woman with an even whiter mop of curly hair, she was calm and patient. Although her words echoed those of Dr. Lee, she did provide unexpected, startling information about the air to which I was condemned, speaking rather formally for a woman who looked like she just finished baking chicken pot pie in her country kitchen.

  “What exactly was that, that . . . I don’t know . . . that odor around me, Doctor?” I asked. “It felt like it was being inhaled and exhaled simultaneously.”

  “It’s called an aura.”

  “And all along I thought an aura was a good thing, beautiful cosmic energy, filled with rainbow colors,” I said with a smile, trying to be funny, but instead sounding as if I still believed in unicorns.

  She smiled. “In this case, it’s a severe warning before a seizure. It includes intense sensory alterations, frequently accompanied by an unbearable odor.”

  “So that was the smell.”

  “What you breathed was a signal that an electrical malfunction in your body was on its way.”

  “So much for my aura,” I mumbled.

  I Sing the Body Electric: 2002–Present

  Brand New Deaths

  Epilepsy. Epileptic. Not words I’d ever wanted to try on for size. I had always thought of epilepsy as something foreign, far removed from my world. Until now, for me it had only been a punchline from an episode of The Simpsons in which the cartoon family was watching a quick-speed Japanese anime flick. Suddenly, Marge, Bart, Maggie, and Lisa are on the floor, shaking uncontrollably. They are all having seizures.

  The audience is supposed to laugh.

  After my January 19 seizure, I wasn’t likely to laugh at seizures anymore.

  I quickly learned more about the world of seizures, and met the doctors, the epileptologists, who are committed to preventing them.

  Dr. Silvie recommended we see Dr. Dobbins, whom she insisted was a pro. Mom came with me to the office of this “pro.” Dr. Dobbins was a fortysomething woman with an Irish brogue. Within one second of my having described my experience to her, she said tersely, “Can I speak to you alone, please?”

  Wow, I must be dying, I thought. My seizure must have been the first sign of a terminal illness.

  When Mom left the room, she pounced on me.

  “Ashok,” she said, as she paused threateningly. “Were you drinking liquor?”

  Defensively, I responded, “No, I haven’t done that since the hemorrhage. Why?”

  “When you drink, you can cause a seizure.”

  “Not a chance. Didn’t have a drop,” I said, before pausing for a second or two. “Hey, why did my mom have to leave?”

  She looked at me gravely. “Mothers should not hear about their sons’ drinking.”

  You gotta be fucking kidding me.

  From that moment on, I disliked Dr. Dobbins.

  She prescribed more Dilantin. Three weeks later, I was alone in my parents’ Jersey home, watching TV. They had gone to the city to see a Broadway show. The smell of burning rubber hit me again. It was another grand mal seizure.

  I quickly ran upstairs to the bathroom, hoping mouthwash would rinse away the taste of hell in my mouth. It didn’t work. I raced back downstairs to the fridge, hoping to find food that would kill the taste. I devoured chocolate ice cream. No luck.

  Next thing I knew, I was on the kitchen floor, my legs shaking back and forth on the cold ceramic tiles. After a few minutes, the seizure subsided. I crawled into bed. When my parents came home, I began to explain what happened. But as I spoke, they were distracted by the sight of my tongue. The lower half was bloody and torn.

  Dr. Dobbins raised my Dilantin level.

  On August 17, 2002, I had my third grand mal while heading to the India Day celebration at Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. We were midway there when the death scent hit me. I screamed to my friend Pablo, a Brazilian immigrant whose English was nearly nonexistent, to hail a cab. He couldn’t translate fast enough. I was spasming on cold concrete once again.

  But once again I learned how wonderful New Yorkers could be. A woman in her late fifties became my Mother Teresa. She squatted by me and gently rubbed ice cubes on my sweating, burning forehead. She also caressed my head, chanting over and over, “Don’t worry about anything. God is with you. Everything will be fine.”

  I must have lost consciousness, because when I came to, the woman had been replaced by a cop. He offered to take me to the hospital, but I firmly declined. I asked him, in
stead, to hail me a cab.

  I thought it was best to try another doctor. Dr. Dobbins recommended Dr. Clark, an epileptologist at a nearby hospital. We were told he was considered one of the best on the East Coast. We had nothing to lose. We gave him a try.

  Dr. Clark was a superstar in the epileptology game, and looked the part. A man in his forties with a shiny ivory smile, he was tall and lean, with short, thick side-parted black hair, handsome, like a news anchorman come to life. Ordinarily, it took six months to get an appointment with him, but Dr. Dobbins helped speed up the process. I had my first meeting with him within two months.

  Dr. Clark worked at a famous hospital in New York City. In his room, there was his epileptology posse: one student and two assistants. This guy was the shizzle. After studying my X-rays, he spoke to me and my parents, declaring with confidence, “There is a simple solution.”

  We were delighted and leaned closer.

  “A lobotomy.”

  At that moment, I think the three of us collectively vomited inside our mouths.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said, and then noticed our sick-green faces. He lifted the X-ray so we could all see it.

  “I hope you didn’t think I said ‘lobotomy.’ I said ‘lobectomy.’ Quite different from a lobotomy. As you can see here, the culprit is the AVM scar. It is sitting on the occipital lobe. That lobe is destroyed anyway, so we can just get rid of it.”

  We were following him so far.

  “Without the lobe, there’ll be no scar. And without the scar, there is little chance that Ashok will continue having seizures.”

  We didn’t want to follow him further.

  “It would be a quick surgery. He’d only have to be in the hospital for four weeks.”

  My parents said we needed to discuss it. Dr. Clark suggested I check into the hospital anyway for a three-night stay, so he could fully check my brainwaves and classify my type of epilepsy. But I was so disturbed by the thought of the lobotomy, or lobectomy, or whatever he called it, that I never went back. I felt like telling him that my skull was not a jar of jelly that doctors could keep opening and closing at will, taking scoopfuls as they chose.