I am left-handed.  Have been my whole life. My brother is as well.  I am pretty ambidextrous though. When I was young and played softball, I would get up to bat and not remember which way to stand and my mom would have to yell out to me.  I do a lot with my right hand. But, I’m left side dominant for sure. I put my left shoe on first, my left leg goes in my pants first, I write with my left hand, etc. So it was rather surprising to me when, prior to the surgery, the nurses and doctors at the hospital kept asking me  if I was sure I was left-handed. I must have been asked half a dozen times. They just didn’t seem to believe me.

The tumor was on the right side of my brain and I had come in with speech issues, so I assumed it had something to do with where they expected my speech areas to be in the brain of a left-handed person. Time to consult my brain book!

Alright. 10% of the population is left-handed. Of the left-handed population, about 70% process language on the left side of the brain, while the other 30%  process language equally between both sides.  So I am in the minority and it makes sense why they would have been asking me.  It also means, as my friend, Ro, pointed out to me, that I’m extremely lucky.  If  I wasn’t in that minority, then who knows when we might have discovered that A-A-Ron even existed.  The sheer fact that he was pushing on one of my language areas and gave me aphasia meant that we found him.  I’ve been quite lucky since this happened, over and over again.  Here is yet another example of things that just worked out in my favor. And I’m going to continue to welcome those things. 🙂

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