Prognosis Quotes

“You’re the pea and I’m the pod.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“No one had told me that sleep disturbances affect most head-injured folk, sometimes permanently, or that a lack of sleep would significantly hamper rehabilitation. I would never have another normal”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“My greatest fear was appearing stupid; a fear I will carry with me for the rest of my life—a tattoo across my forehead only I can see. All I wanted was to be invisible.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“The sound my skull makes as it hits the rock is like no sound I have heard before. It’s an assault. One part crack, one part slosh, one part thump. My brain shudders inside my skull. I feel it move.3 When”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Those are my last thoughts as a person with a healthy, normal, functioning brain.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“I planted a lawn last year. I went to a garden shop and bought long rolls of grass that I laid out like a carpet over a bare patch of ground. Six months later, around two-thirds of my newly planted lawn had started to grow, but the remainder was parched and brown despite regular watering, fertilizer, and lawn pellets. Nearly twelve months later, the healthy parts of the lawn were thriving and slowly creeping across the areas where the new grass had previously refused to grow. I will never lay another lawn: gardening, it turns out, is not one of my talents. But the lawn is a good metaphor for the way in which the brain compensates for damaged cells. Eventually (perhaps in years to come), the healthy parts of the lawn will be so hardy that no one will notice the bald patches of dead grass. After my chance meeting in the park, that was my new hope for my brain.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“I hadn’t slept in more than a week. Moments after I fell asleep, I felt my mother’s hand on my leg. “He’s gone.” He had clung to life knowing I was there beside him. He needed me to leave, to allow him to die.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“A delusion can be a handy thing to cling to, and by not writing—and therefore not failing at it—I could kid myself into thinking I still had the possibility of succeeding.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“The number eighty sloshes around inside my head, like dirty water inside a bucket.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“It took brain damage to make me realize how arrogant I’d been.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“No matter what I did I couldn’t seem to turn on my brain. Its power had been drained.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“And I certainly don’t look as though I have anything wrong with my brain. Apart from my left eye, which, people are telling me, struggles to keep pace with my right.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Little good comes from a head injury, but it does cut down the wait when you show up unannounced at the emergency room. Mentioning the words “horse,” “thrown,” and “head” pushes you right up to the front of the line, ahead of everyone apart from people who have stopped breathing, people whose hearts have given out, and people with severed limbs.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“What happened to your eye?” “What’s wrong with it?” I ask. He peers in and looks at me closely. “Your left eye has turned inward slightly. And it doesn’t seem to move.” “I got thrown off a horse,” I say. “Yesterday.” “You need to see an eye doctor. Now. I’ll find someone.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“In four hours over four consecutive weeks, I had convinced her I would never be a rider. Riding was the first of many things for which I exhibited no talent. Next came the piano, then the violin, and then anything that involved numbers or foreign languages.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“If you search long enough”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Drugs muted the pain, but they didn’t kill it.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“In the unlikely event someone knocked at our door, George barked savagely and bared his teeth. If anyone wanted to mess with his brain-damaged owner, they would have to deal with him first. Bess, a gentler dog than George, licked my hands and face and wagged her tail to let me know that everything that existed outside my brain-damaged world was fine.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“And there it ends. My prognosis. Our conversation. Life as I knew it.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Rage robbed me of what little self-respect I had left. It signaled defeat, failure, and a complete loss of dignity.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Despite the huge numbers of people suffering head injuries every year and the staggering costs associated, research into traumatic brain injury has been chronically underfunded.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Norman Cousins: The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Shame stuck to my sides, wherever I went, whatever I did. Shame was the reason I had locked myself away from the world and had severed contact with the people who had once been my friends. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone I knew seeing the person I had become. A person who was angry, depressed, stupid, and lost.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone I knew seeing the person I had become. A person who was angry, depressed, stupid, and lost.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“She would take no shit. And that could only be a good thing.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Most children outgrow such delusions. Not me. I harbored them right through adolescence into adulthood. If anything, age seemed to embolden me. The older I got, the more I enjoyed walking down dark alleys at night alone, venturing into places I knew to be dangerous and pitching myself against whatever fate might hold.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“What about my PhD?” I ask. He clears his throat, and I hear what sounds like a scoff. “There is no way you’ll be able to finish a PhD.” And there it ends. My prognosis. Our conversation. Life as I knew it.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“Eighty. Eighty. Eighty. A frighteningly low number for someone holding down an executive job, someone who is partway through her PhD.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain

“She smiled, took my hand, and led me upstairs to her bedroom. An elderly cat with gray curly fur used a set of cat stairs to join us on the bed.”
― Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain