My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (10 page)

By the time we arrived, I was still conscious but obviously delirious. They placed me in a wheelchair and led us into the waiting room. Steve was clearly distressed with their indifference to the severity of my condition, but he obediently filled out my paperwork and helped me sign my name. Waiting for our turn, I felt the energy in my body shift and like a balloon I deflated into my own lap, shifting into a semi-conscious condition. Steve insisted that I receive immediate attention!

I was taken to have a CT scan of my brain. They lifted me out of the wheelchair and placed me on the CT gurney. Despite the throbbing pain in my brain that was echoed by the thumping sounds of the machine's motor, I was conscious enough to find some satisfaction in learning that my selfdiagnosis had been correct. I was experiencing a rare form of stroke. I had a massive hemorrhage flooding the left hemisphere of my brain. Although I don't recall it, my medical records indicate that I was given an initial dose of steroids to slow the inflammation.

The agenda was to ship me immediately to Massachusetts General Hospital. My gurney was lifted and bolted into position in an ambulance for the ride across Boston. I remember that a kind-hearted paramedic accompanied me along my journey. With compassion, he wrapped me in a blanket and arranged a jacket over my face to protect my eyes. His touch upon my back was comforting; his gentle kindness, priceless.

I was finally free from worry. I curled up into a fetal ball and lay waiting. I understood that, on this morning, I had witnessed the step-by-step deterioration of my intricate neurological circuitry. I had always celebrated my life as a magnificent physical manifestation of my DNA, and oh, what a colorful genetic pool from which I had been spawned! For 37 years, I had been blessed with an agile mosaic of electrified biochemistry. And, like many folks, I had fantasized that I wanted to be awake when I died because I wanted to witness that remarkable final transition.

Just before noon, on December 10, 1996, the electrical vitality of my molecular mass grew dim, and when I felt my energy lift, my cognitive mind surrendered its connection to, and command over, my body's physical mechanics. Sanctioned deep within a sacred cocoon with a silent mind and a tranquil heart, I felt the enormousness of my energy lift. My body fell limp, and my consciousness rose to a slower vibration. I clearly understood that I was no longer the choreographer of this life. In the absence of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and fear, I felt my spirit surrender its attachment to this body and I was released from the pain.

Upon my arrival at the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency ward, I landed in the center of an energy spin that I could only describe as a bustling beehive. My limp body felt heavy and terribly weak. It was drained of all its energy -- like a balloon that had been slowly and thoroughly deflated. Medical personnel swarmed about my gurney. The sharp lights and intense sounds beat upon my brain like a mob, demanding more attention than I could possibly muster to appease them.

"Answer this, squeeze that, sign here!" they demanded of my semi-consciousness, and I thought,
How absurd! Can't you see I've got a problem here? What's the matter with you people? Slow down! I can't understand you! Be patient! Hold still! That hurts! What is this chaos?
The more tenaciously they tried to draw me out, the greater was my ache to reach inside for my personal source of sustenance. I felt besieged by their touching, probing, and piercing; like a slug sprinkled with salt, I writhed in response. I wanted to scream,
Leave me alone!
but my voice had fallen silent. They couldn't hear me because they couldn't read my mind. I passed out like a wounded animal, desperate to escape their manipulations.

When I first awoke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. (Heart felt thanks to the medical professionals who stabilized my body and gave me another chance at life - even though no one had any idea what or how much I would ever recover.) My body was draped in the customary hospital gown and I was resting in a private cubicle. The bed was partially raised with my aching head slightly elevated on a pillow. Devoid of my usual well of energy, my body sank deep into the bed like a lump of heavy metal that I couldn't begin to budge. I could not determine how my body was positioned, where it began or where it ended. Without the traditional sense of my physical boundaries, I felt that I was at
one
with the vastness of the universe.

My head pulsed with a tormenting pain that pounded like thunder while a white lightning storm raged theatrically upon the inside of my eyelids. Every little shift in position that I tried to make required more energy than my reserves held. Simply inhaling hurt my ribs, and the light that flooded in through my eyes burned my brain like fire. Not able to speak, I begged for the lights to be dimmed by burying my face into a sheet.

I couldn't hear anything beyond the pounding rhythm of my heart, which pulsed so loudly that my bones vibrated with ache and my muscles twitched with anguish. My keen scientific mind was no longer available to record, relate, detail, and categorize information about the surrounding external three-dimensional space. I wanted to wail like a colicky newborn that had been suddenly plunged into a realm of chaotic stimulation. With my mind stripped of its ability to recall the memories and details of my previous life, it was clear to me that I was now like an infant - born into an adult woman's body. And oh yes, the brain wasn't working!

Here in this emergency cubby, I could sense, over my left shoulder, the presence of two familiar associates as they peered at a CT scan mounted on a wall light-box. The picture on display contained serial sections of my brain, and although

I could not decipher the words my colleagues softly shared, their body language communicated the gravity of the situation. It didn't take someone with a Ph.D. in neuroanatomy to figure out that the huge white hole in the middle of the brain scan didn't belong there! My left hemisphere was swimming in a pool of blood and my entire brain was swollen in response to the trauma.

In silent prayer, I reflected,
I am not supposed to be here anymore! I let go! My energy shifted and the essence of my being escaped. This is not right. I don't belong here anymore! Great Spirit,
I mused,
I am now at one with the universe. I have blended into the eternal flow and am beyond returning to this plane of life -yet I remain tethered here. The fragile mind of this organic container has shut down and is no longer amenable for intelligent occupancy! I don't belong here anymore!
Unencumbered by any emotional connection to anyone or anything outside of myself, my spirit was free to catch a wave in the river of blissful flow.
Let me out!
I hollered within my mind,
I let go! I let go!
I wanted to escape this vessel of physical form, which radiated chaos and pain. In those brief moments, I felt tremendous despair that I had survived.

My body felt cold, weighty, and ached with pain. The signals between my brain and body were so defective that I couldn't recognize my physical form. I felt as if I was an electrical being; an apparition of energy smoldering around an organic lump. I had become a pile of waste, leftovers, but I still retained a consciousness. A consciousness that was different from the one I had known before, however, because my left hemisphere had been packed with details about how to make sense of the external world. These details had been organized and ingrained as neuronal circuits in my brain. Here, in the absence of that circuitry, I felt inanimate and awkward. My consciousness had shifted. I was still in here -I was still me, but without the richness of the emotional and cognitive connections my life had known. So, was I really still me? How could I still be Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, when I no longer shared her life experiences, thoughts, and emotional attachments?

I remember that first day of the stroke with terrific bitter-sweetness. In the absence of the normal functioning of my left orientation association area, my perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle. The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. Finer than the finest of pleasures we can experience as physical beings, this absence of physical boundary was one of glorious bliss. As my consciousness dwelled in a flow of sweet tranquility, it was obvious to me that I would never be able to squeeze the enormousness of my spirit back inside this tiny cellular matrix.

My escape into bliss was a magnificent alternative to the daunting sense of mourning and devastation I felt every time I was coaxed back into some type of interaction with the percolating world outside of me. I existed in some remote space that seemed to be far away from my normal information processing, and it was clear that the "I" whom I had grown up to be had not survived this neurological catastrophe. I understood that that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning, and yet, with that said, who was left? Or, with my left hemisphere destroyed, perhaps I should now say, who was
right
?

Without a language center telling me: "I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I am a neuroanatomist. I live at this address and can be reached at this phone number," I felt no obligation to being her anymore. It was truly a bizarre shift in perception, but without her emotional circuitry reminding me of her likes and dislikes, or her ego center reminding me about her patterns of critical judgment, I didn't think like her anymore. From a practical perspective, considering the amount of biological damage, being her again wasn't even an option! In my mind, in my new perspective, that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning and no longer existed. Now that I didn't know her life - her relationships, successes and mistakes, I was no longer bound to her decisions or self-induced limitations.

Although I experienced enormous grief for the death of my left hemisphere consciousness - and the woman I had been, I concurrently felt tremendous relief. That Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had grown up with lots of anger and a lifetime of emotional baggage that must have required a lot of energy to sustain. She was passionate about her work and her advocacy. She was intensely committed to living a dynamic life. But despite her likable and perhaps even admirable characteristics, in my present form I had not inherited her fundamental hostility. I had forgotten about my brother and his illness. I had forgotten about my parents and their divorce. I had forgotten about my job and all the things in my life that brought me stress - and with this obliteration of memories, I felt both relief and joy. I had spent a lifetime of 37 years being enthusiastically committed to "do-do-doing" lots of stuff at a very fast pace. On this special day, I learned the meaning of simply "being."

When I lost my left hemisphere and its language centers, I also lost the clock that would break my moments into consecutive brief instances. Instead of having my moments prematurely stunted, they became open-ended, and I felt no rush to do anything. Like walking along the beach, or just hanging out in the beauty of nature, I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the beingconsciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive. I stopped thinking in language and shifted to taking new pictures of what was going on in the present moment. I was not capable of deliberating about past or future-related ideas because those cells were incapacitated. All I could perceive

was right here, right now, and it was beautiful.

My entire self-concept shifted as I no longer perceived myself as a single, a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. I understood that at the most elementary level, I am a fluid. Of course I am a fluid! Everything around us, about us, among us, within us, and between us is made up of atoms and molecules vibrating in space. Although the ego center of our language center prefers defining our
self
as individual and solid, most of us are aware that we are made up of trillions of cells, gallons of water, and ultimately everything about us exists in a constant and dynamic state of activity. My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea.

For many of us, thinking about ourselves as fluid, or with souls as big as the universe, connected to the energy flow of all that is, slips us out just beyond our comfort zone. But without the judgment of my left brain saying that I am a solid, my perception of myself returned to this natural state of fluidity. Clearly, we are each trillions upon trillions of particles in soft vibration. We exist as fluid-filled sacs in a fluid world where everything exists in motion. Different entities are composed of different densities of molecules but ultimately every pixel is made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons performing a delicate dance. Every pixel, including every iota of you and me, and every pixel of space seemingly in between, is atomic matter and energy. My eyes could no longer perceive things as things that were separate from one another. Instead, the energy of everything blended together. My visual processing was no longer normal. (I compare this pixilated perspective to Impressionist pointillism paintings.)