The Day My Brain Exploded Read online

  I completed my mission. Twice.

  To my surprise—and excitement—both did the trick. Nothing had changed from prebleed Ashok. Not that it mattered. Aside from pleasuring myself occasionally, I had little sexual interest. The brain bleed had ended that, at least temporarily.

  The Wonderful World of Therapy

  In order to exist once more, I had to do extensive therapy. You name it, I was doing it: speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and most important, cognitive therapy. My brain bleed had left me with the brain of a newborn. I wanted to become an adult again. I sought teaching aids to stoke my intellect. I remember being given crossword puzzles to solve, and a test about matching people to occupations. That test was positively racist: the WASP guy was the lawyer, the Chinese woman was the violinist, the black man was the basketball player, the Indian guy was the engineer, and the Latina was the maid. I went on a tirade about prejudices and racism, a tirade which, while over the top, a least proved to the therapist that my intelligence was intact.

  I was also progressing in physical therapy: walking, moving my hands, twisting my shoulders. I knew I was lucky, because many brain hemorrhage survivors become paraplegic or quadriplegic. That thought depressed me.

  One of the exercises involved touching the middle fingers of my left and right hands to the tip of my nose repeatedly—a traditional exercise performed by drivers suspected of drinking too much. I was good at that one. I was also made to walk down a corridor with my head held erect and while keeping my balance, like a hallway Naomi Campbell on a catwalk.

  Amid all the excitement of therapy, I joined a gym. I always hated gyms, since exercising in front of buff people was humiliating. But this gym was actually a rehabilitation center frequented by senior citizens. Seeing eighty-year-olds attempting squats made me feel better about myself.

  On my first visit to the gym with Mom, I felt weird. My arms were in bandages and I still had my head wrap. As we reached the center, a lady was walking in. She was bowlegged and hunched over. When I came to the front desk, I saw that she was the check-in person.

  “Hola!” I said, trying to seem casual, but trying too hard.

  With a sigh, she told me to sign in.

  I stared at her. She was more than bowlegged; the left side of her face was paralyzed, a mask of pink concrete. She smiled but her mouth could open only halfway. I smiled in return.

  “Have you had brain surgery?” she asked me.

  “I guess my head wrap gave it away,” I said.

  “My skull was opened, too,” She said. I looked closer. She appeared to be in her early forties, skinny and very Caucasian.

  “I had an AVM bleed and a craniotomy,” she said.

  At that point, I yelled with glee, probably stopping half of the hearts on the workout floor. And then I hugged that hunched, disfigured woman. I had finally met someone like me!

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Carol.”

  “I’m Ashok.”

  We hugged once more.

  I never knew recognition could feel so good. At that moment she became my sister, a member of the family. Her body was damaged in the same way as mine. Our skulls had been opened. All brain patients were now related to me.

  I would never see Carol again, but it hardly mattered; having met her in the first place was good enough for me.

  Warning: Memory Lane Under Construction

  Having once considered amnesia a plot gimmick used only in soap operas, I now realized it was real.

  I began to take inventory of my memories. I could barely remember important life events from after the age of twenty. I could barely recall anything of the week leading up to the hemorrhage. While my memory slowly improved, I learned I was suffering from more than amnesia.

  I had completely lost emotional memory. I could intellectually remember places I had once frequented. For instance, when I finally found Washington Square Park—thanks to a map and a passerby—I could recall my NYU days. But the memory invoked no feelings. My heart remembered nothing at all, even though I knew I had been there. Frightened by my lack of emotions, I did a quick experiment. I phoned my mother, asking what she remembered about giving birth to Prakash. I wondered if she would recall more than the date.

  “It was surreal, magical,” she said.

  I said, “That’s great—but can you actually experience those feelings right now, as you mention the day?”

  “Of course! My heart feels warm just thinking about it. And I’m smiling.”

  I subsequently asked Prakash and Dad similar questions about important events in their lives. Both responded similarly, recalling what they actually felt in the past.

  My short-term memory was destroyed. Since I couldn’t remember what another person had just said, I was unable to sustain conversations.

  Once, Karmen and I were discussing the 2000 presidential election.

  “Can you believe Bush stole the election?” she said.

  “Not surprising,” I agreed, “since Katherine Harris was already backing him up, serving as his oral glory-hole in Florida.”

  “Definitely. Now we have a fake president in the White House. What do you think about that?”

  I hesitated and looked at her quizzically. “What do I think about what?”

  These types of conversations would happen all the time.

  I used to try to laugh it off, explaining that I was having “senior moments,” until I realized there was nothing funny at all. The short-term brain fizzles weren’t confined to conversations; I couldn’t watch video movies without hitting the “pause” button, since I already would have forgotten the previous scene. Moreover, I would forget characters and dialogues within five minutes. In the movie theater, I was no longer able to enjoy a film.

  Eventually, after watching public-access television programs about brain boosting, I discovered an exercise to strengthen my short-term memory. It involved Prakash.

  He would have to write a list of random words and then read the words to me. I was to repeat those words back, correctly. With my cognitive skills barely evolving, I never fully succeeded. Example:

  Prakash: “Red, Coma, Wednesday, Technicolor, Morphing.”

  Me: “Red, Coma, Windy, Testicle, Mormon.”

  I tried to bulk up my retention skills by watching game shows, focusing on the quiz questions and the puzzles.

  I became hooked on “Wheel of Fortune,” forming, in my mind, a warped, virtual-reality ménage à trois with Vanna White and Pat Sajak. At first, I would be unable to solve the puzzles, let alone remember the categories. Eventually I became an expert.

  Still, improvement was slow, reminding me of the extent of the damages. This was not science fiction; my brain really had detonated.

  Not even Vanna could have prevented that.

  Jeepers Creepers, Where’d You Get Those Peepers: 2000 (VI)

  Learning from Marilyn Monroe

  My vision therapist murdered me and saved me at the same time.

  A proudly femme white man, Walton was six foot four and weighed only one hundred thirty pounds. In a breathy voice suggesting a Marilyn Monroe drag act, Walton confronted me about the issue I had tried to avoid: my half-blindness. The doctors had already discussed it with me, as had my parents, many times. But I had not intellectually understood the condition. There didn’t appear to be a cutoff point in my vision, so I believed it was completely intact. It took a while for this to sink in, because Walton’s Monroe accent was so distracting.

  But no matter what distractions I faced, I still had to learn to see. My sight had been cut in half, down the middle—in both eyes. The AVM had burst in the right side of the back of my head, the location of the occipital lobe, which governed sight. The hemorrhage had left me half-blind for the rest of my life, a condition called “bilateral homonymous hemianopsia.”

  But there had been a problem: although the doctors told my family that I had become permanently blind on the left side as soon as the hemorrh
age happened, I, myself, was never informed of this during my incarceration, as they feared this news would be too great of a shock to my system—and might damage any chance I had for a sound recovery in the hospital. It was only after my release that the doctors and therapists felt it was safe to inform me that I had become half-blind. It took Walton, however, to nail it into my head.

  Not only had I become blind in the left half of each eye, but I had a blind spot near the middle of my field of vision.

  Walton taught me how to compensate for the vision loss, how to turn my head back and forth to widen the field of vision and rapidly shift my eyes from side to side while my head was stationary. I resembled a 1930s screen villain, mustachioed and shifty-eyed, ready to trick detective Charlie Chan. I was told always to stay on the far left in group situations, in order to see as much possible. Walton told me to do this every time I was in public, from concerts to jogs to movie theaters.

  Ole!

  It was difficult to adjust to my newfound vision loss, as I quickly discovered. The first time Mom, Dad, Prakash, and Karmen took me out to eat, we went to a family-oriented Mexican restaurant with sombreros and street signs on its stucco walls. On the Friday night we stepped out it was fully packed.

  We were given an unnecessarily oversized booth. As Walton had instructed, I sat on the left end, far removed from the others. Mom sat near my right, while the others sat on the facing side. Our waitress was a pretty white coed, who, judging from her accent, must have been a recent transplant from the South. Her name tag said KATHY-KATE.

  “How y’all doin’?” she asked after we sat down. Her smile was warm and inviting. “I’ll give y’all a moment to look over the menu.”

  When Kathy-Kate came back, she asked which drinks we wanted. Everyone ordered Cokes except Mom, who specified “Sprite, with no ice!” (It’s been my experience that many Indians are obsessed with drinking ice-free liquids.)

  Since it was my first time out, I celebrated with a virgin strawberry daiquiri.

  We placed our orders when she returned. I chose the three-chicken enchilada platter, while the others ordered equally standard Mexican cuisine.

  Some time later, Kathy-Kate returned with the food.

  We dug in. My family became involved in an animated conversation, leaving me on my own. It felt like I was on a football field yards away from the action, but I was happier that way, since I had overheard snatches of their discussion, which that night centered on Rosie O’Donnell.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of slowly consuming my tasty enchiladas, rice, and refried beans, I noticed my food quickly vanish. I was puzzled.

  “Hey,” I muttered to Mom, reaching to tap her shoulder. She didn’t pay attention.

  I spoke much louder, and tapped again. “Hey, Mom.”

  She seemed irritated to leave her conversation.

  “They didn’t put much food on my plate!” I yelled. “Look at it, where are the enchiladas?”

  She finally turned toward me. There followed a ten-second silence.

  “Oh God.”

  Upon hearing her cryptic statement, Dad, Prakash, and Karmen stared at me.

  “Your pants,” Mom gasped. “Look at your pants. And turn your plate around.”

  The left leg of my light tan cargo pants was greasily coated with a pungent mess of two smeared enchiladas and a splattering of wet beans.

  I spun the plate from left to right.

  Sure enough, the left side was bare. I had only eaten from the right section of the plate. As I had no vision of the left side, my fork had speared the rest of my meal off the plate and into my lap.

  I looked at the damage without saying a word.

  Dad yelled for Kathy-Kate, who had lost her earlier charm completely by ignoring us throughout our dining experience.

  “Excuse me!” he boomed, “Kathy-Kate, we need your assistance!”

  Smiling as if she never left our side, she walked to the booth.

  “How’s everything, Shug?”

  “My son has made a bit of a mess. We need some extra napkins and some more water.”

  Her eyes widened at the sight of the mayhem.

  “No!” I yelled defensively as the other patrons watched. “I’m fine, I can clean this up!”

  “But there’s a lot of food there, Shug,” Kathy-Kate said patiently. “I’ll be back so we can clean this in a jiffy.”

  “Fine,” I said in resignation, surveying the damage my blindness had created.

  She came back with paper towels and water and that old stand-by, club soda, to mop up, of course.

  I had to wipe my lap myself. I doubt she wanted to come near my bean-and-salsa-soiled crotch.

  When we left, Kathy-Kate received a hefty tip.

  A Different Kind of Video Game

  Reading, writing, and making art were three of my most vital prehemorrhage activities. I feared that the vision loss would render them impossible, so I started to work to restore my skill. The first book I attempted to read was from the Harry Potter series. I did so with a ruler, placing it under each line of text so I knew when to move to the next one.

  It took me a week to read it. When I finished, I had never been so happy to follow the adventures of a four-eyed moron.

  I learned to write again by choosing random subjects, like celebrity substance abuse. Whitney Houston became my muse. I wrote my epics in no time, without errors.

  Creating art, though, was a problem. I used to love symmetry in both my paintings and drawings. My favorite subject was portraiture. Now that I could not see half a face, I worried that I would never paint again. “Picasso went through many phases of art during his life,” people reassured me. “This is the new shape of your art.”

  The resulting faces, rendered in acrylic paint on canvas with the help of rulers and grids, looked far from human. My first large-scale piece was called “Self-Portrait: Damage in Utero.” It depicted my mother, completely nude, her uterus visible. Inside was embryonic Ashok, his young brain bleeding. I submitted “Self-Portrait” to a New York City gallery show called Terrorvision. It was rejected.

  My vision rehabilitation involved seeing a neuro- ophthalmologist specializing in brain-sight issues. The doctor’s name was Ferdinand Damore, and he was fantastic.

  Named one of America’s leading neuro-ophthalmologists by a popular New York magazine, he was a short white man with glasses whose lenses seemed thicker than his legs. Walton referred me. I knew I was lucky to have Dr. Damore, although I always wondered why a top eye doctor resembled Mr. Magoo.

  At every appointment, he made me take a “field test,” perhaps the worst exam since the SATs. This was like a Playstation on smack. I had to look through a telescopelike instrument, viewing a large, empty gray screen with a sunlike object in the middle. Stars of all sizes, from large to minuscule, moved across the screen. Every time I saw a star, I had to press the button on a joystick.

  It was meant to measure my field of vision. But every time I did it, I knew I couldn’t see a star on the left side unless it touched the sun. I had to take the test multiple times. Each time it was over, the doctors presented a printout of the actual field, with dots indicating how many times I saw the star. Each time the result was the same: one side was covered by dots, the other side was empty, confirming a lack of vision, straight down the middle, in both eyes.

  I tried to justify my vision loss. The world was bad enough with perfect 20/20; I’m lucky that I can witness only half of it. Or I reminded myself that the left side was historically the “sinister” side, so I was free from evil. But these were feeble attempts.

  The vision loss was insidious: there was no white or black line—or anything for that matter—to indicate where my vision ended. I thought I saw everything in my field of vision, when in fact, I was only seeing half. Although I wished I could see fully again, I began to understand that my situation would likely never change.

  I was told I could never drive again. Taxis and buses became my new best friends, the s
ubway my soulmate.

  My hemianopsia reinforced the emotional amnesia that was occurring in my relationships. Rather than simply forget general feelings about past experiences, I would also forget short-term fighting and reconciling. Say I had a fight with someone in the morning, and we made up in the afternoon. We’re friends again by evening, laughing and joking. The next morning, I remember we battled. But I don’t remember the resolution, or how I reacted. Upon waking, my anger is fresher than ever.

  Poor Prakash had to deal with this memory roller coaster often. Especially concerning my sight loss.

  Day 1

  11 a.m.:

  I’m talking to Prakash on the phone.

  “Ashok, I have some interesting news for you,” he says, sounding both delighted and smug.

  I’m getting excited. Interesting news? I love interesting news!

  “I can’t wait to hear it, Prakash, and don’t spare any details.”

  “I’m getting a new car, and I’m really thrilled about it. I can’t wait to drive it!”

  “That’s great, have fun in it,” I say glumly. After a moment of silence, sound returns.

  “You don’t seem too happy about it,” he complains, “if it was the other way around, I’d totally be happy for you!”

  “Fuck off,” I say. Then I hang up.

  11:10 a.m.:

  Prakash calls back. “Why did you just do that?”

  “You do realize that I can never drive again, right?”

  “Oh please, nobody believes you’re really blind, you’re probably faking it. You look fine.”

  “Why would I lie about this? I would give anything to have my sight back! I don’t want to take buses forever.”

  “Just think,” Prakash says, laughing, “now you can join the losers, cheapskates, and ex-cons who always take public transportation. It’ll be fun.”

  “Karma’s going to bite your ass. Not only will you wake up blind, but you’ll be paralyzed so the only way you can move is in a wheelchair.”