Life After A Stroke

Geoff Dyer comes to terms with suffering an ischemic stroke at age 55:

There had certainly been some cognitive impairment, but my wife insisted that this had occurred before the stroke. I used to pride myself on my sense of direction but that had long gone south, or maybe north or east. I had trouble concentrating but that too had been going on for ages; I put it down to the internet, not to my brain blowing a fuse or springing a leak. So no, nothing had gone permanently wrong in my head, or at least nothing had gone wrong that had not been in the process of going wrong for a while, but I now regarded my head and the brain snuggled warmly inside it in a new and vulnerable way.

I’d been looking forward to signing up for a medical marijuana card in LA, but the prospect of smoking pot now seemed quite dreadful. While marijuana might meliorate the symptoms of some conditions it seemed guaranteed to send the stroke victim spinning into an epic bummer in which you either fixated on the stroke you’d just had or the one that could blow your brain apart at any moment, the one that might be brought on by worrying about it. That was the thing about all this: it was a brain thing, and I loved my brain and the way it had been going about its business so gamely for more than half a century.

Let’s say you have something wrong with your liver or heart. Terrible news. But if you’re lucky, if you get another one and take the right medication you’ll be back to your old self again. But with the brain, the one you were born with either works or it goes wrong and you start sliding away from yourself.