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This essay appeared in the January 2006 edition of Kaleidoscope Magazine, issue #52. The essay was written in late 2003, and is copyrighted to Laura Bruno, 2006.

Conscious Living:

How a Brain Injury Changed the Way I Make Decisions

by

Laura Bruno

The week before my twenty-fifth birthday, life seemed unbelievably easy.  Three months earlier, I had accepted a four-year scholarship and fellowship from Northwestern University ’s doctoral program in English Literature.  Eagerly, I counted down the hundred plus days to graduate school.  Hoping to provide a financial cushion for student life, I had worked to close the highest possible sales before resigning as East Coast Account Manager.  A number of stubborn NYC prospects had just agreed to carry our product line, and I looked forward to my July paycheck with its large Spring Quarter sales bonus.  Classes would start in September, but I planned to quit in August.  I wanted a full month to adjust to my new life.

On May 19, 1998—three days shy of my birthday—a car accident destroyed the life I knew.  Regaining consciousness, I heard the honking horns as beeps of my alarm clock and wondered how my bed had turned into a car.  Not until I saw the woman behind me flailing her arms in panic, did I realize she had hit me.  Mild traumatic brain injury catapulted me into a world of mental confusion, double vision, and excruciating chronic pain.  Headaches and vertigo left me unable to read longer than five minutes a day.  My IQ dropped 40 points, and I suffered from debilitating visual and auditory oversensitivity.  My plans to become an English professor froze and shattered, as I spent months icing my head in a darkened room. 

The “old me” had been able to explain how Milton revised Platonic theory in Paradise Lost; the “new me” had difficulty making sense of even the simplest “if, then” statements.  Nor could I make quick, rational decisions anymore.  This unexpected disability revealed itself on my first jaunt to the Acme supermarket across from my apartment.  When I saw the fluorescent glare off too-white floors, a searing pain shot through my temples.  “Be fast,” I grimaced, “You can do this.”  But fast, I was not. 

Five times, I wandered by the same man offering samples of Italian sausage.  I explained to him that I was vegetarian and did not eat pork.  I drifted through the store, and his presence became familiar.  I felt grateful for the repeated “hellos,” because they grounded me when the aisles began to spin.  He was like the starting line on a circular track, orienting me each time I passed.  After five laps, I had still not selected any food.  “OK,” I smiled at the man, “I’ll buy some sausage.”  I, the starry-eyed vegetarian, bought the family pack.  

“With the sausage I need spaghetti,” I thought, “and some sauce.”  The sauce stumped me.  I stood in front of all the brands and wanted to run.  Prego or Ragu?  The question seemed monumental and confusing, even though I have always hated Prego.  I closed my eyes and grabbed a bottle.  Prego it was. 

When I arrived home, the time disturbed me.  I had left my apartment shortly after 11 a.m.  I bought nothing but pasta, Prego and those sausages.  It was after 1:00.  The arduous, yet cavalier nature of my choices scared me.  Sauce brands hardly mattered, but the selection process had paralyzed me.  If I could not make insignificant decisions, how could I possibly choose the right treatment options or another career?

Around the time I would have been writing my first paper for graduate school, I invited my sister and her boyfriend over for dinner.  I had purchased a Pad Thai mix that called for added chicken or tofu.  Unable to pick one over the other at the store, I had bought both in order to save time.  Twenty minutes before my guests’ arrival, I needed to make the deferred decision.  My brain short-circuited on the way to the refrigerator.  Tofu or chicken?  Tofu or chicken? Tofu or chicken?   The question repeated itself in dizzying spirals of noise until I wanted to scream. 

My eyes welled up, and I felt my head throb in what would shortly become the sickening waves of a migraine.  I had looked forward to my sister’s visit.  In frustration and desperation, I cried out to God or no one, “What are we supposed to eat for dinner?”  “Tofu.”  The answer was clear, immediate, and calm.  The pounding in my head subsided enough for me to cook the meal and enjoy my company sans migraine. 

I remembered that moment during the next months’ challenges.  Each time the cacophony of choices overwhelmed me, I asked for help.  Each time, I received an answer.  One night, while brushing my teeth, I looked in the mirror and saw someone I hardly recognized.  My eyes looked vacant—like the eyes of my grandmother’s inbred miniature poodle.  I could follow orders, but I could no longer make up my own mind.  I thought of my lowered IQ and sudden inability to understand punch lines.  “I’m dumb,” I mused, “I am so dumb!”  I smiled through toothpaste and felt strangely relieved. 

Before the injury, I had prided myself on the ability to evaluate and determine the proper course of action.  I had remained poised in my sales job no matter what customer service issues arose and had usually managed to turn a company screw-up into a closer client relationship.  I had spent the evenings of business trips studying for the GRE, and when finished with graduate school applications, had perused the entire reading list for 19^th century British Literature.  Six months before matriculating, I had already known my dissertation topic. 

Except for a few unruly eccentricities—like writing academic papers that doubled as satires and admitting to our company president how uninspiring I found his sales meetings—I had mostly done “the right thing.”  Nonetheless, I had often felt a vague gnawing just beneath the surface.  Sometimes I had choked on the sawdust of my subconscious, but I usually had managed to sweep away concerns.  With my new “prayers,” the nagging ceased.  “I’m too stupid to trick myself,” I giggled. 

I began living in a constant state of prayer.  Tuning in to something beyond me was the only way I could navigate the misfiring neurotransmitters.  If I prayed, I knew exactly what to do.  Sometimes the answers seemed strange, but I no longer trusted my own definition of absurdity.  In a world where someone with a Masters degree in English Literature could not read, whom was I to determine what made sense?  After a few weeks, I noticed that I felt more content with my decisions than I had pre-injury.  As I relied increasingly upon spiritual guidance, the underlying chatter in my mind diminished.  Though in constant physical pain, I experienced peace for the first time in my 25 years.

About 21 months post-injury, the fog in my brain began to clear.  Still impaired, old sequential reasoning techniques vied to regain control.  Apparently, that initial peace had occurred only as a temporary cease-fire while rational thought played dead.  Merely injured, my convalescing left-brain wanted to resume its former dictatorial position.  Months away from the inner turmoil had shown me what life could be like, if I submitted to a higher and more benevolent power.  Despite my disabilities, I enjoyed this newfound spirituality.  My old mind had been gone so long that I had adopted a new way of life.  I had not counted on Reason’s possible return.

In order to make a full recovery, I knew I needed to integrate both sides of my brain.  Prayer aided in my decision process, but it had not cured me.  I still suffered from double vision and cognitive problems.  Constantly fatigued and nauseated, I could not remember phone numbers, and reading them still caused migraines.  The flicker from ubiquitous fluorescent lights disoriented and confused me, and I frequently lost my balance.  An EEG showed asymmetrical activity in my left and right occipital lobes:  if I wanted my eyes to work together, the warring factions of my brain had to cooperate.

At the recommendation of a top expert in vertigo, I began visual therapy with a behavioral optometrist.  Specializing in connections among mind, body, and vision, he prescribed a combination of eye exercises, herbal supplements and cranio-sacral therapy. I experienced a headache-free two days for the first time in sixteen months.  I spent another 30 months doing intensive eye and balance exercises designed to correct binocular dysfunction.  As my eyes struggled to work together, the tension between the “old me” and the “new me” grew more pronounced.  If I wanted peace and single vision, then I had to stop looking towards my past as the standard for wellness. 

Over the next several months, the struggle between left and right, old and new, rational and spiritual transformed into a true commitment to heal.  Before the accident, I had yearned for a more spiritual outlook on life.  I was just afraid of making the wrong decisions.  I would do what seemed right and then feel like I had missed something more important.  Losing my rational side taught me to trust intuition and prayer as valuable guides; my inability to function without it taught me to appreciate all aspects of consciousness. 

Some studies claim we use only 10% of our brains.  I disagree.  Injuring one part of my brain affected all the others.  Healthy areas tried to compensate for damaged ones, but these makeshift synapses thwarted nature, leaving me non-functional.  Since over-reliance on any area of my brain disabled me, natural balance became the key to wellness.

I had mistakenly assumed that “living the spiritual life,” meant leaving rationality behind.  I thought I had to choose between mysticism and recovery.  Only after I recognized the value and natural functions of my left-brain, could I embrace my entire brain and let it heal.  Instead of trying to decide between “rational” and “spiritual,” I opted for “natural.” 

When doctors called me permanently disabled, it seemed as though I had no choices left.  I could no longer read or work or drive.  My life determined itself through the process of elimination, and if I tried to exercise any influence, the results were random and exhausting.  I eventually learned that even a world of such limited scope demanded some selection.  The injury removed career opportunities, but an enormous array of everyday choices remained.  Realizing the inevitability of making decisions encouraged me to find a better method.  If I could not escape free will, then I might as well make the best of it. 

My appreciation for literature had grown out of an original passion for creative writing—something I had always loved but had been afraid to pursue.  It had seemed too risky, too revealing, and too close to my heart.  Academic writing afforded a steadier income and a distance between writer and reader that felt safer, less vulnerable.  The timing and severity of my injury guaranteed that I would not become an English professor, but I wondered if I really needed to give up everything I loved about literature.  

In October 2001, I began writing poetry because it did not tax my eyes so much as prose.  The exercise reignited my love of creative writing.  On a dare, I submitted five poems for publication.  I considered it such an unbelievable success to have recovered enough to write a poem that it did not even scare me to feel judged by editors.  A month later, I learned that a magazine wanted to publish two of my poems!  Encouraged, I continued writing—to the small extent that my vision allowed.  A year and countless migraines later, I finished an essay for an Animal Communication Writing Contest.  To my surprise and delight, I won.  (“The Backyard Owl” will appear in Voice of Choices magazine and in Patricia Spork ’s book, Loss, Comfort and Healing from Animal Sightings.”)

 The success felt wonderful, but it also evoked those nagging undercurrents I thought I had left behind.  I had been disabled for more than four and a half years.  I still could not function on someone else’s schedule or in a noisy or overly visual environment.  I could barely read, and yet … I was winning contests, being published.  The “old me” would have fallen back on a regular job or academia, agreeing to write in my spare time.  But the “new me” did not have that luxury.  I could wallow in discarded dreams, or I could try to make an impossible one come true. 

In order to do so, I needed a new, non-flickering monitor.  Recognizing the risk, I cashed in a small IRA to pay for a top of the line laptop with a large LCD screen.  I had never in my life bought a top of the line anything, but I knew I could not commit halfway.  So far, the gamble seems to have paid off.  I now write four to six hours a day, and the flexibility of a laptop allows me to control my work environment.  I just completed a book length manuscript called If I Only Had a Brain:  52 Healing Hints from a Survivor of Traumatic Brain Injury.  Unlike other TBI recovery books, mine encourages readers to chart their own inspirational journeys.  I am also writing two novels and several short stories and poems.  Once I complete these projects, I plan to continue writing fiction.

Choosing consciously has brought with it tremendous responsibility, but also an incredible sense of freedom and joy.  I still experience dizzy days, in which I can do nothing to tame those rebellious eyes.  Sometimes, I feel deeply discouraged.  Then I remind myself how far I have come from that first trip to the grocery store.  There is also the fact that I now write fulltime, a dream held long before I had ever thought of graduate school.  Despite—or perhaps because of—my enforced limitations, I found ways to pursue my true passion.  I still pray:  with gratitude.  My worst nightmare is becoming a dream come true.