Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

by Sarah Vallance

Dogs never give up on us, even after we have given up on ourselves. They accept us as we are, love us without conditions, and do not cast judgments. There is no greater gift for the brain-injured person than a dog.

As to why no one had told me that the brain can repair itself, the answer may lie in the attitude of health-care professionals toward victims of TBI. Researchers have found that qualified doctors in particular are known to blame TBI victims for their injuries. One study found that “among qualified health-care professionals . . . negative attitudes exist towards survivors of brain injury which can lead to adverse behaviors towards the individual.”9 It’s a scary thought: you turn up in the emergency room after a bad knock to the head, and your treatment is compromised because the doctor who sees you assumes you were foolhardy and responsible for any injury you have sustained. I can’t speak for everyone, but I am fairly certain no sensible person wants a traumatic brain injury, so any suggestion of blame seems misplaced.

“You have made some truly baffling decisions,” he said to me once, with both eyebrows raised, “but you have managed to land on your feet. You have forged your own way and done everything on your own terms. Few people can boast that. I am very proud of you, Pod.”

Had the decision been left to him we would have seen no one at all—no family, no friends, no neighbors. We were an odd family.

Stare into the eyes of a dog, and you may experience what researchers have called an “oxytocin-gaze positive loop,” in which oxytocin levels are raised in both you and your dog.13

The only things my mother and I seemed capable of talking about without fighting were my dogs.

We visited every art museum, and I saw every Edward Hopper painting on display in the capital.

The world is full of crazy people, I decided, and a lot of them seemed to be in America.

I don’t know why, but I have always found the sight of white women in saris ridiculous.

Familial love is complex and inexplicable,

Years later, long after Laura had left me, I tried to understand the cause of my rage and learned that 70 percent of all head-injured people experience explosive anger or constant irritability following their accident. Not coincidentally, a significant proportion of that group end up in prison. There was a clear link between violent crime and brain damage. In a New York Times article, Daniel Goleman referenced two studies involving twenty-nine murderers on death row across four American states, which found that almost all had evidence of a serious brain injury that may have triggered their violence. The two biggest risk factors for violence among these inmates were brain damage and a history of domestic abuse during childhood.15 I had been hit as a child and had also suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Can you do me next?

He was a lot like a dog, really, without all the effort a dog required.

depression fuels lassitude like petrol fuels fire,

Boccaccio believed that to be noble, a man had to embrace life as it was, to face adversity without bitterness, and to accept the consequences of his actions. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live.

Learning to live from day to day is not as easy as it sounds. Neither, I’ve realized, is it impossible.