Tag: neuroplasticity

From “This happened” to “I have changed”

Reading more of Left Neglected has gotten me thinking more about my experiences over the course of my diagnosis and treatment. The main character gets released from rehab and goes home to discover that the room in which she imagined resting and having coffee was now her mother’s bedroom and that there is orange tape all over the place highlighting the left edges of things to make them more noticeable to her brain. I was going to say that her environment is both familiar and different. But really so is her experience inside her brain. Ultimately, everything is both familiar and different at the same time. This is certainly an experience that I can relate to that permeates through my life to this day.

One thing that has remained firm for the character is her self-identity, in that she is in a stage where she is “going through something” but does not see herself as different. She is pushing for things to be normal, to stay normal, and seeming to ignore the obvious obstacles to that. They don’t get a handicapped parking tag because “she’s not handicapped”, though she has great trouble walking 4 blocks to a restaurant, even with help from her cane and her husband, and wishes the whole time she had gotten that tag. She has to use the restroom in a restaurant but doesn’t want her husband to go into the women’s room with her. She makes it in there, chooses not to use the handicapped stall, then regrets all of her decisions when there are no grab bars and she winds up having to call her husband in to help her get up and get dressed anyway. Although part of it may be stubbornness, I think more of it is that she still sees herself as the same person she’s always been. She’s just going through something; she’s not different.

I assume the character will overcome this at some point, and certainly I did as well. I am not sure when it happened that I went from “a person going through treatment for a brain tumor” to “I am a person with a brain tumor who has visual and cognitive impairments and can no longer drive or work and my life is different now”. Perhaps there’s always a little bit of transition back and forth from these 2 stages too as every single day is a learning experience that shifts how the next day will be perceived. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a glimpse into the mind of someone going through a journey like this. My blog can only provide so much to you fine folks. 😉

The Eyes Continue to Surprise

I enjoy when I find Bitmojis or GIFs or whatever that represent some part of my experience well or with humor. This one is an old favorite of mine because it so brilliantly captures my experience of brain damage:

I recently stumbled upon another one that led to an unexpected experience. I have written many times about my visual deficit, the loss of much of my vision on my left side in both eyes, called Homonymous Hemianopia, resulting from my brain surgery slicing away some of my optic nerve. Previous posts have pictures of my actual visual field over the years since my surgery but they don’t show what things look like through my eyes. People have difficulty understanding what it really means, but this does a pretty good job of illustrating my visual deficit:

It’s not that I see a black space; it’s just that I take in what I do see and there’s nothing else unless I go searching for it. This particular image in an example, but backwards, in that I’m missing the left side and see what’s on the right side. So I created the mirror image to better match my actual vision. This one is what I see when I look in the mirror. It is also how I see you if I’m talking to you. I am looking at your left eye, on my right side.

The surprise came to me when I looked at this second one on my phone. My eyes freaked out and couldn’t handle looking at this third person view of what I normally see. I did NOT expect that at all. I had to switch back to the first one to settle my brain a little. Who would have thought that I could easily look at the mirror image, but not the correct orientation? I pondered on this for a few days. I have two guesses. The first is that my brain just really hates my hair parted on the opposite side. 🤣 My second guess is that my brain has learned that there is often more information that can be found by scanning left and that I naturally do this now. I think it threw my brain for a loop when there was literally nothing over there but white space. It simply doesn’t compute and my eyes get strained and I have to lean back from the picture while it’s in front of me, even while I’m sitting here typing. I have nothing profound or philosophical to say about this; I just had an experience that I found super interesting and wanted to share with folks who might also find it interesting. I am thankful that my brain continues to entertain me.