The Day My Brain Exploded Read online

  I never called her.

  Forgive me, Lorna.

  Lazarusness: 2004–Present

  Shark

  My sadness in my loneliness was gradually escalating into heightened self-pity and full-blown envy. I realized that I had been staying in the same place in life while everyone was moving on. Prakash may have altered his world during my hospitalization for those few months in 2000, but his life never stopped after that. He strengthened his new marriage, received his MBA, joined a worldwide restaurant corporation, and started his own realty business.

  Jorge received huge promotions in his marketing company and had become a junior vice president. Z moved to Paris, and was getting married. My former college buddy Luis had become a high school calculus teacher and was now heading to Oxford. Moriyama, an obese old acquaintance and a self-proclaimed fashionista, had started an e-commerce company devoted to origami with his partner, Aaron. It had become massively successful.

  Their happiness increased my nausea. Who the hell were they to succeed? I was the smart one, the creative one, the ambitious one.

  Jealously toward my peers was nothing. I had even greater anger towards my dad. As a senior auditor for a worldwide pharmaceutical firm, he traveled internationally and inspected plants. While I was in recovery, Dad had traveled ten times, to Europe, Asia, Australia. Every time he went to the airport, I felt like screaming with angry jealousy. Here I was, stuck in my New York City apartment or in New Jersey, sitting in front of a TV.

  I was immobile, while everybody in my life seemed to be moving forward.

  I once heard that a shark has to keep moving underwater to live. If he stops and stays where he is, he dies.

  I felt like I was dying. Fortunately, I realized I didn’t want to.

  Luckily, the burden of visual distortions was decreasing; I refused to pay attention to them, thereby stripping myself of my daily experience with them. While I continued noticing, intermittently, elongated or squat visions, I stopped being horrified by them.

  Letter to Prakash

  I often wondered how to possibly confess my rippling emotions to the primary blood-tie, who was born without defect: my savior, my rival, my brother.

  (First draft of a letter)

  Dear Prakash,

  Let’s face it. I’m jealous of you.

  Dammit. You did not get a birth defect, although we came from the same womb. You have your full sight.

  Dammit. You never have to fear seizures.

  Dammit. You went to business school after my hospitalization and received your MBA from Wharton.

  Dammit. After my hemorrhage, you continued to move ahead in your life and your career.

  Dammit. You created two real estate businesses and scored a senior-level position in a major global hotel corporation.

  Dammit. You’re happily married with a beautiful home. Dammit, dammit. You have a million friends. Dammit. Dammit.

  You have a life.

  I have none of these things. Well, I have a life. I lost it and regained it. The only problem is, I’m not living it.

  (Second draft)

  Dear Prakash,

  I beg your forgiveness. And Karmen’s. I ruined your wedding day, the most special day of your life.

  I ruined your reception; you never had that important first dance with Mom. I ruined the joy you were supposed to feel altogether.

  (Third draft)

  Dear Prakash,

  Thank you for always singing the theme to Good Times while I was in my hospital bed.

  (Final draft)

  Dear Prakash,

  Thank you for being there when I needed you the most. Everytime I look at you, I feel joy and gratitude. At the same time, I can’t look at you without feeling despair and jealousy. I hope, one day, I can look at you without having any mixed feelings.

  Understanding My Ticking Time Bomb

  My mental correspondence with Prakash did nothing to alter the intensity of my jumbled feelings, nor the intensity of my sadness and isolation. I decided the only way to begin dealing with the situation was to find out, once and for all, all about the culprit behind everything: my AVM. Because of the horror of the entire event, I had never done really intense, independent research on my birth defect, instead relying on doctors and their informational pamphlets to explain everything. There were staples and screws and metal in my head, that I knew, but I still couldn’t spell out what happened within my cranium, and now I pored through this literature as if I were hunting for timeshares. Clearly I didn’t want to accept that I had been born with a murderous defect.

  I previously had decided not to dwell on what caused my grief. Now, however, after nearly four years, after my hundreds of lonely days, and after my encounters with Lorna and the old man, I was prepared to face it all.

  I found out what percentage of people are born with this congenital birth defect that had caused my brain to explode: less than one tenth of 1 percent of the population in the entire world. It can also occur, to a lesser degree, in other bodily sites, including the spinal cord.

  The actual definition, according to America’s leading governmental neuroscience organization, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS):

  Arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) are defects of the circulatory system that are generally believed to arise during embryonic or fetal development. . . . They are comprised of snarled tangles of arteries and veins. Arteries carry oxygen-rich blood away from the heart to the body’s cells; veins return oxygen-depleted blood to the lungs and heart. The absence of capillaries—small blood vessels that connect arteries to veins—creates a short-cut for blood to pass directly from arteries to veins. The presence of an AVM disrupts this vital cyclical process. Although AVMs can develop in many different sites, those located in the brain . . . can have especially widespread effects on the body. . . .

  AVMs account for approximately 2 percent of all hemorrhagic strokes that occur each year. . . .

  If a large enough volume of blood escapes from a ruptured AVM into the surrounding brain, the result can be a catastrophic stroke.

  I flinched when I read the term “catastrophic stroke.” It certainly was an apt definition for my brain’s explosion.

  Also, I discovered that AVMs are disorders within a bigger crisis known as traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The facts about TBI astonished me. A few statistics: Over 2 million Americans suffer TBIs yearly; 5.3 million Americans live with a disability caused by TBI; in the U.S. someone sustains a brain injury every fifteen seconds; TBI-related deaths exceed AIDS-associated deaths and affect more people annually than AIDS, breast cancer, and multiple sclerosis combined.

  But TBI receives virtually no federal funding.

  And, according to Brain Injury Association of America, one of the gravest consequences faced by all TBI survivors is:

  “Total isolation and disappearance of socialization.”

  This diagnosis not only described my situation. It explained it.

  Lazarus

  With better understanding of the world of brain injury, I was finally ready to follow my doctors’ suggestions and attend the TBI support group, my new peer community. I quickly bonded with one member: an outspoken woman in her late fifties named Nancy. She came from Russia and had a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. A brilliant and funny lady, she was fully functional except for a severe lisp. Her brain injury occurred when she was fifteen. An already brilliant little girl, she had been playing with her younger siblings in a park when she fell from the monkey bars; her head landed right on the concrete. At the time, Nancy was diagnosed with a minor brain injury. But when she was thirty it was discovered that her frontal lobe had been torn in the fall. Still, when we met I was dumbfounded by her knowledge: she was well versed in literature and psychology, even enjoying reading Lacan every now and then. Nancy’s level of intelligence showed me that brain injury doesn’t automatically mean becoming stupid and inarticulate. It gave me hope that I could maintain my intelligence. Finally,
I realized that my overwhelming jealousy and isolation were hiding an upsetting truth.

  I had been lost on a desert island, and the mainland was far, far away. But unlike those folks stranded on Gilligan’s Island, I had nobody with me, not even the Skipper. At least I had stopped feeling self-pity; I was now in a state of rage. The whole world around me seemed to be set on “play,” while my life was on “pause.” I wanted to unplug this DVD player. As a result I vented in meetings, ranting about jealousy. I noticed that many others were nodding their heads in agreement. The more I ranted, the more everyone articulated their own grievances, their own jealousies. I did try to help the other members, though. A young woman who was recovering from an aneurysm started crying about how she felt useless, how she was like a child again and had to start all over.

  “It’s a good thing,” I cheerfully said, offering a ridiculously lame affirmation. “Think of us like a new fashion line—we’re hip, modern, fresh!” To the people who could comprehend what I said, this comment drew mostly groans. At one specific meeting, Charles, the young man who had been gay-bashed into complete, irreparable brain damage, voiced his anger over an All My Children episode he had just seen. An actor named Marco Judson now had the role Charles had played years earlier: a hunky construction foreman who was having an affair with the neighbor next door, as well as with her daughter. “That was supposed to be me!” he yelled.

  Kari, our beloved moderator, faced him like a patient schoolteacher. “Charles,” she said, “that Marco guy might have the role, but he might have some problems you don’t know about.”

  “You mean like a mansion and a playmate wife?” Charles said, astonishingly sharp.

  Kari sighed. “Mansions and playmates come and go, Charles, they mean nothing. You know that.”

  Charles gave a weak smile.

  “The main thing is, he looks like he’s balding pretty bad.”

  Charles gave a not-so-weak smile.

  After one meeting, I spoke to Kari. “Can you let me know what happened to Charles after his beating by the cop? Did he seek compensation?”

  “Charles’s family sued the New York City Police Department for over twenty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s great to hear, at least something was done.”

  Uncharacteristically blunt, she responded, “They gave him a check for five hundred.”

  Even with the occasional good cheer—and somewhat forced rationalizations—of group, I knew one thing for sure: I would never truly believe that surviving my brain hemorrhage was some fantastic achievement. After all, I was devastated by the pain, the personality changes, the mental deficits, the loss of a former identity, and most severe, the murderous isolation. For the rest my life, I would feel like the science class earthworm. Like that worm, my body and my being might have regenerated, but I would never be entirely whole, and would remain only a portion of what I once was.

  Most group meetings would end with Kari giving us her “don’t compare apples to oranges” spiel. If a brain injury survivor should compare herself to anybody, it should be to another brain patient, she cautioned. Once, Kari asked to speak to me privately after everyone left.

  “You do realize how lucky you are, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “I even have ‘survivor guilt’ when I look at those poor people. I look relatively unscathed compared to them.”

  “Then why are you so upset? Look at them and realize how far you’ve come.”

  “But I see all my asshole friends making it big in the world, while I’m doing nothing.”

  As if talking to an infant, Kari said, “Ashok. I hate to put this to you, but you were crippled. You couldn’t do anything at all. Look at you now.”

  The proverbial lightbulb finally popped on above my head. I had been crippled. She was right. I had come a long way since then.

  And actually, my achievement was even greater than Jorge’s or Z’s. I’d had to learn to speak. To walk. To think. And I did it all within four years. I hadn’t merely pursued a new job—I had learned how to live again. None of my bitterness, resentment, anger, and jealousy could discount that. It took an underpaid social worker to teach me a truth that any moron on the street should be able to understand: I had learned how to live again.

  That was more than enough.

  Brain Karma: 1974–———

  God

  I believe in God. There has to be a reason why I’m still here. Sure, the surgeons did a bang-up job in bringing me back to life. They inserted clips and resected veins and arteries in my skull. Nobody is dismissing their exceptional job. Peanut’s not that dumb.

  But, in the end, they were simply gas station attendants, while God was the fuel I needed to keep me alive.

  To me, the Divine is beyond gender. Yet I now realize that God—male or female—holds an infinitely feminine power, though not in the way the West thinks of femininity, as a purely inactive, nurturing essence. Yes, that aspect is definitely present, but “female” power, described by us Hindus as Shakti, is ferocious, powerful, ruthless, and at times vengeful.

  After my own hallucinogenic journey into “the liquid afterlife,” God’s cosmic uterus, I believe in the womanhood of God, represented by the sheer force of the hypnotic warrior-mother-goddess Kali, correlated with shakti. However, I couldn’t have survived without the passivity of Lord Krishna, whose loving and warm sensuality embraces the nurturing side of both genders. Both worlds—the loving and the vengeful—assisted me in my path to resurrection.

  Kali, her tongue ferociously extended, holds a sword. Krishna, the tender, affectionate deity, plays a melodious flute. The flute and the sword symbolize the two deities—the two aspects of God.

  In my transformational journey, I veered back and forth from wielding the sword to playing the flute.

  Moments of forcible rage swiftly changed to passive surrender. In the end, neither sword nor flute consumed me wholly. But the holy union of both saved me.

  Teacher’s Pet

  Life is bondage. Everything we see around us is illusory, or maya. Reincarnation exists because we must return to goddamn earth again and again until we fully evolve—until we fully grasp the unreal nature of the material world. In other words, the body is a prison from which our souls must be freed.

  After what happened to me, I’ve begun to understand.

  Only when you witness your once-healthy mind and body deteriorate do you realize that real life is unseen, beyond physical comprehension.

  The whole thing is like high school; achieving ultimate consciousness and awareness is the equivalent of finally entering senior year. Spiritually, that’s a level that usually takes numerous lifetimes to reach. Then, and only then, can we graduate and find salvation, or, as some might say, heaven. We can, at last, travel past even the Liquid Afterlife.

  I don’t know why I’ve been given a second chance on this Earth: to walk, talk, see, hear, and breathe. Having had the divine experience of swimming in God’s womb, the experience of living after dying, I’ve worked hard to exist again, to move beyond the soul-and-body-scarring that began with one fateful orgasm.

  God might be a strict, ass-kicking high school principal, but She’s a fair grader.

  Yet although I will never make valedictorian, I definitely won’t flunk this time around, whether this journey ends tomorrow or two months or sixty years from now. I was granted access to enter the liquid afterlife, for at least a moment. So I think that I’ll be moving up a rung in the next life, graduating to the next grade.

  After all, I’m sure my brain’s cum-triggered odyssey slash adventure slash nightmare slash resurrection has earned me, at the very least, a bucket-load of Bs in this lifetime.

  And maybe even an A or two.

  No Pity Required, Just Fresh Breath: Present (I)

  Horseshoe Souvenir

  My craniotomy gave me a dubious and permanent gift: the horseshoe scar on the back of my damaged skull. Worst of all, everyone could see it but me.

&nbs
p; Upon first returning to New Jersey after my hospitalization, my parents insisted that I leave the house occasionally to become accustomed to the outside world. We took tiny visits to nearby areas. As I walked with a cane, my body fell forward, or to the side. Sometimes Mom and Dad took me to parks. These outings were pretty uneventful, except for one time. We were sitting on a bench, when a young woman in velour track pants was passing by. She was walking her dog, but she stopped to look at me. Stare at me, actually. Irritated that she gaped at my head as if it were a Movie of the Week, I decided to shock her into running away.

  I grabbed my crotch and yelled to my parents: “It still burns! I thought everything had cleared up, but Lord Almighty, it still burns!”

  Dad and Mom laughed as the girl and her dog raced away.

  The mall was worse. From the moment we got out of the car in the parking lot, I received stares: from adults, seniors, and of course, little kids.

  I heard the same parent-child dialogue as I left the car, every single time. There were some variations, of course. But most were exactly the same.

  “Momma, what’s wrong with that man’s head?”

  “Don’t stare, [insert child’s name here].”

  “Look, it’s all cracked!”

  “Shhh. Looks like something horrible happened to him. Poor man.”

  “His head doesn’t look human!”

  I was forced to hear this dialogue over and over, since the doctors had forbidden me from wearing hats for a while, all in the name of letting my skull “breathe.”

  There were, not surprisingly, other similar experiences: at a cosmetics counter where I’d gone with Mom, another at a movie Dad and I had gone to. Each time I felt both angry and sad, and even worse, very, very alone.

  Brain Patients Just Wanna Have Fun