Runaway Brain

by Emily Bell

I cannot remember how it started. Which is not surprising. The business of losing your mind, even temporarily, is the business of picking up a smashed mirror, unraveling tangled wool with boxing gloves on.

Was there something to do with boxing that started it? Was that it? Had I been punched unnaturally hard in the head?

Or maybe a disturbance in the street? Rioter? Was it a loud march, hot and angry? Or the sound of heavy machinery ripping up the road, beeping yellow and red lights six floors below? Or did it start in Yemen? Evan Gershkovich was freed, I think. Or maybe not. A fever dream of planes, and headlines. Was that it? A news-induced stroke? Or had I hit my head at the swimming pool? Had I swum?

I didn’t know how I had lost my mind but last Friday morning it was gone. I woke up and I did not know anything. I did not know even IF I had woken up at all. But I did know that something very wrong had happened. Wrong enough to interrupt my husband Ed’s 8:00 a.m. zoom call with direct instructions: “I am having a stroke, take me to hospital.”

Here I was, a hypochondriac with an internet connection, finally experiencing one of the things I had most dreaded: a sudden terrifying health failure, an impairment with the additional ironic twist of making it impossible for me to either Google anything, or remember the results if I had.

As I am an even more unreliable witness from this point onward for the next four hours, I am relying on the accounts of those who saw it firsthand: Ed, and the doctors who wrote up my observational notes. For me the fragments of an understanding of what happened beginning at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning give way to a black memory hole. I just about recall we got an Uber not an ambulance, I recall it being stiflingly hot but raining. I don’t remember the very swift passage through the emergency room, which is maybe the only upside of arriving at a hospital declaring that you might be having a stroke.

I don’t remember either the CAT scan or the chest X-ray, which is a shame, because I have poured a lifetime of anxiety into close research of health issues, and it is devastating to have been unable to take advantage of the opportunity to obsess over a medical procedure. And if possible to engage in my own private re-enactment of the film Paper Mask.

(On my second of three pregnancies, a young registrar casually asked me, “Are you a medic?” after I gave her a rundown of my bloodwork, scans, fetal dimensions, and commented on the anomalous presentation of my diastolic blood pressure readings. On my third, a strict consultant anesthetist threatened to stop the C-section in theater, unless the bungling hospital could find my misplaced notes. “What would you like to know?” I asked, cracking my knuckles, with assured focus. Half an hour later the epidural block was administered and the cutting underway).

In the hospital according to reports I seesawed between extreme anxiety (“I think I am dying—this is how it happens, right? People wake up in the morning, they have a massive stroke and that’s it?”), sentimentality (“We’ve had such a great life…tell the boys I love them”), and practicality (“If I can’t remember anything at all—I am fairly sure I won’t be able to work”). Without the aid of my mind, unable to convert a single second of activity into a solidified memory, I was helpless.

Absent-minded professors are a trope. But like many tropes, they are also disinformation. I have never met an absent-minded professor. Everyone I know of rank in academia is a razor sharp motherfucker. Nobody forgets anything. Or at least nothing relevant to their incredibly narrow but essentially important field.

“Can you tell me who the President is?”

I look at my watch. It’s 10:30 a.m., I am in a cubicle with a woman who has said she is 88, her memory is working fine. The doctor checks herself: “...The answer is not as easy as you might think.” I grope towards clarity. 

“It’s not Kamala Harris, it must still be Joe Biden… have we reached the stage of presumptive nominees yet?” I feel I have to over-prove my brain. I try and appear learned.

I look at my watch again, it’s 11:30 a.m. Now I am looking at a child’s picture. I can recognize the bicycle, fire engine, and a scene involving a ladder, a dog, a mouse, and a pot of paint. I look at my watch, it is 12:30 p.m.

“Who is the President?”

It’s still Joe Biden but not in the way that you think. He’s got a problem with his memory, which should not disqualify anyone for high office I believe. Somewhere in the next three hours more happens, according to my notes. I name a lot of animals in alphabetical order: “baboon, badger, capybara, coypu.” I count back from 100 in sevens effortlessly, which is strange. I talk knowledgeably about brain tumors, although I am told that if I have one, they couldn’t see it on the scan. 

There was no stroke, they tell me that.

I have what they think is something called “Transient Global Amnesia” (TGA). My husband tells me there was a comedic passage where I asked the doctor several times “So what is it you think I have?”, to be met with “AMNESIA.”

For a part of the afternoon I cannot remember the word “Amnesia.” I look at my watch, it is 2:30 p.m.

TGA is “rare” and “benign”: 5 to 10 people per 100,000 experience it, but for the over-50s this fraction ticks up to 23 to 32 people per 100,000. I read more. Apparently 14 percent of people experiencing an attack “think they are dying.” I can’t imagine what the other 86 percent are thinking.

Nobody knows what causes it, though there are some suspected triggers, e.g. changes in temperature—like cold water swimming—infections, stress, and emotional upset. The day before my attack I had been out in a NYC heatwave to buy a Covid test.

“Hmm that might do it,” the doctor said.

I look at my watch, it’s 4:30 p.m., and time is slowing down. I can now remember the last doctor I saw. “Chicago, red, 33,” I remember that too, and I remember who the President is.

In the twelve hours I spend in the emergency room slowly recovering my memory and learning bits and pieces about my condition, I think about my parents. I spent hours with them in hospitals, much less patiently than my stoic spouse has been with me today.

They both lost their minds, in different ways. Dad’s Alzheimer’s was brutal. It made him shockingly exaggerated, agitated. His mind was like a box of library catalog cards, tipped out and put back in a random order, over and over again. Being with him was like sitting in a room with a light switch flipping on and off. Every time the light switch flipped on, the person was different, the memories changed, the mood swung. You left the room, re-entered five minutes later, and he would greet you as if for the first time. He fixed my youngest son with a frighteningly steady gaze: “You,” he said sharply, “are as beautiful as a summer’s day,” and then he softened. He identified Haydn in five notes. He thought we were still at war.

My mother remembered what she had forgotten. “I have no idea who came yesterday.” She read the paper, understanding most things but realizing it was like pouring water through a sieve. I feel her memory loss keenly. I know what it’s like to know who the president is, but not what you did yesterday. We could have talked about it during the hours I spent at her bedside last year, in between the crossword and the obits, which I read out so she could see who she had “beaten.”

Arriving home, the road is milled outside. The heavy vehicles were real. Evan is really free. I start to remember things from the day before. A trip to the Yemeni coffee shop, a map on the wall, going to buy a Covid test, but the jumble of images makes my head hurt.

I text friends, “So…interesting day.” One texts back to say I have picked a very good 48 hours to erase from my mind.

There are riots in the streets of Britain, mosques are being attacked over someone who is not a Muslim. The Olympics is embroiled in a social media war, people shout about a trans boxer who is not trans. A man boxing women, who is not a man. Donald Trump, who is not the President, has told us that Kamala Harris, who is also not the President, is not Black. Even though she is in fact Black. Elon Musk says that a civil war in Britain is “inevitable.”

It strikes me through the fog, as the terrible inconsistencies in these 48 hours of “events” seep back into my recovering brain: there is a collective losing of minds, a failure of recent memory, a confusion where I’m not the only one who keeps asking, “Who’s the President?” over and over again and tailoring our answers to fit our beliefs and not the facts. A giant memory hole wherein the grifters, Nazis, shitposters, and bigots are busying themselves trying to reconstruct a false account for the ages.

I wake on Saturday, euphoric. I can remember everything, save four hours. I have not lost my mind completely. Yet.