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Tales from the Other Side of Language 11 I’ve been in the hospital for a month, and the doctors discharge me with a pill to take once a day for blood thinning. Kathy is definitive, not happy with this treatment plan. She jeers, “Tiny orange pill!” I take the doctor’s word. I’m happy to be home, reattaching to the bigger world. But Kathy is right—the little pill doesn’t hold the onslaught. In a bare two weeks I’m re-hospitalized, mini-strokes, TIAs. I’m put on serious IV blood thinners. In the quiet of the hospital I can feel them softly hurry across my brain. It is unstable; I know I can have another big one. I tell nurses whenever the little mini-strokes happen. One reassures me, “Perhaps it’s anxiety.” “No! ….not ….li…ke… th…at!” I exclaim hotly to her brush-off. I try not to be terrified. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest runs through my mind again. My life is too close to the edge. The various films don’t look like anything the doctors have seen before. They have no treatment, only the IV blood thinners. They present my case to clinical case conferences in all the major hospitals in the city. I am the mystery case. The hospital has a little rooftop garden. It is early summer, and I’m allowed to take my IV pole down the elevator. I shed my hospital gown and for awhile soak in the sun wearing a trumped-up bright blue bikini from my underwear, dreaming I’m on the sand at Fire Island. Visitors come, admire my growing tan. Then a nurse calls from a high window that doctors want me, and the dream beach shatters.
12 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: This story is broken, like my language. Before and after are mixed up, like my speech, little sequences, shards. I can’t convey how it is inside this crucible as though it’s a regular narrative. It’s not lived that way. Later maybe, but not now. I’m stepping outside to reflect. The inside self and the thoughts are lost from connection to others. I’m in existential shock, living in the moment. It is a practical matter, not enlightenment. Ordinary life is gone. The narrative, like my words, is disordered … patchy … shards … fragment moments, like broken sentences. My mind is not a deranged or idiot mind, but a mind trying slowly to see itself, to articulate without steady expression. There isn’t a road in front of me, no visible signposts to guide. Without words, signposts, and markers of forks and intersections, the path itself is gone. Not just that my life is irrevocably changed, but the essence of my very being is being altered. Life, reduced to crushing small pieces of moment, is losing the foundation, the arc of personal narrative. Small events are the dramatic tension. Single events placed side by side, by side, by side, like single words on a charm bracelet. I pick up the shards as though there were a narrative, as though the path I knew, or any path, were visible. That is what I’m doing. Brave, valiant, necessary, but not real. I don’t know how to invent a life. I use the pieces that are still left lying around. They are the only narrative there is, small events. Any stroke is unique; they are like that, each one physiologically different. One recovers or dies. But the loss of language is not unique. One lives with it in its many forms. At least a quarter of a million people each year in this country alone fall newly into this wilderness of aphasia through stroke, brain injury, or disease. I can barely articulate what is happening. I experience no storyline, little past, no future in my mind. Not memory loss. I am flooded by the present—one word at a time. Without words to organize and plan my mind’s intentions, there is only my vibrating body, at a loss, at sea, thundering waves. I’m not used to
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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“Without Utterance is a testimoni
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