Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery - Hardcover

Liontas, Annie

 
9781668015544: Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668015544 ISBN 13: 9781668015544
Verlag: Scribner, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award and the Jeanne Córdova Prize

This powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays “reflects on history, philosophy, and love while living with head trauma” (The New York Times Book Review).

“An infuriatingly gorgeous, important book.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties * “A riveting book about embodiment, pain, identity, and intimacy…this book is a stunning achievement.” —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

After suffering multiple concussions in her thirties, Annie Liontas shares what it means to be one of the “walking wounded” in Sex with a Brain Injury. Facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships, Liontas is forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction and finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Through Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, we can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.

For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience…stands as testimony to love and patience” (Kirkus Reviews).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, she is a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. She lives in Philadelphia.

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1. The Life Cycle of a Concussion the life cycle of a concussion
It starts with a big bang. It comes from the sky: a meteor, a falling object, a box. It comes out of nowhere, a car, a baseball, an opponent’s fist, a partner’s fist, an officer’s baton, a player’s helmet, the banned Kani-basami throw during the girls’ judo tournament, a skateboard crash, a roller coaster, the blast of an IED, a low-sitting shelf, a low-hanging branch, a rogue wave, a 2x4. Or you fall off your bike on a quiet road.

You do not pass out. You aren’t likely to, less than 10 percent of concussions result in loss of consciousness (this happens only if the rotational forces at the junction of the midbrain and thalamus result in a disruption of the system that regulates your sleep-waking—that is, you get hit at just the right spot). Later, you will wish you had passed out for just a minute or two, as proof to you and everybody else that something happened. You will secretly wish that there was blood, not too much blood, not like a whole brain bleed. Just, like, a touch of Halloween-style makeup.

Your brain, which is the texture of butter, ricochets around in its own liquids. It slams against the wall of the skull. The axons that connect the white matter of the brain—each a tiny filament less than 1/100th of a human hair in diameter—fray and tear. The headaches, the dizziness, these will come soon enough. Right now, you are freaked because something is up with your eyes. You were told by the cartoons that you’d see stars, but actually the world is retreating, as if the air is taffy being pulled and stretched, the world in present tense and you several seconds behind.

Your friend answers the phone call you don’t remember making, scrapes you off the pavement, stealing glances at you in the passenger seat because he’s nervous you’ll fall asleep, or worse. You try to be the same person you were before you fell off your bike, crack a joke about how hard your head must be, only you’re not sure if you actually spoke out loud or if you said the joke twice or if your friend was actually the one who made the joke. This is called, you are told, confusion. At the hospital, if you’re lucky, you’re put through a CT scan. The CT scan does not show a thing, because technology cannot yet detect the microscopic axonal injury of concussion. The scans come back normal. The formal diagnosis is “traumatically induced transient disturbance of brain function,” but the people who treat you now and in the coming months interchangeably use the words “concussion,” “mild head trauma,” and “traumatic brain injury” so that when you leave with the paper that says what you have and what you should do—which you cannot read, why can’t you read? You were in the Acorn group in second grade, which means you have been praised for your reading abilities since age seven and are pretty sure you’ve only gotten better since then—you are lost. You realize you have no idea what a concussion is, really.

Your knowledge about TBI—traumatic brain injury—comes from the movies or the news. The one about the skiing accident, the horrific car pileup, the boxer’s career-ending match, the brilliant lawyer-doctor-professor-soldier-architect who can no longer feed himself and must learn how to walk again with the help of the doting wife. To you, “traumatic” suggests debilitating disability. The images scrolling through your mind are categorized as “severe TBI,” an injury that ranks 3 to 8 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) and likely results in amnesia, slurred speech paralysis, or days of unconsciousness. Think of Tracy Morgan, comatose for two weeks after a speeding Walmart truck crushed his limousine, followed by five months in a wheelchair. Conversely, if you had a moderate TBI, you would have likely passed out for twenty minutes to six hours, and upon waking might face permanent cognitive limitation or emotional lability—9 to 13 on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Think of Roseanne Barr, who talks about how her family took in Holocaust refugees; how, after she was hit by a car at age sixteen and impaled by a hood ornament, she was never the same. “It’s still you,” Barr says, “but it’s an artificial intelligence you.”

You are not Tracy Morgan or Roseanne Barr. Apparently, what you have is far less tragic, is in fact minor, which is why they put a little “m” in front of it and call it “mild TBI.” Tiny baby teeny-weeny mTBI, a.k.a. concussion, a.k.a. not something that the Glasgow Coma Scale is very much help with since it only evaluates loss of consciousness. You think of these three categories of brain injury as three separate boxes—severe, moderate, mild—when in reality they are more like steps down to the same dark, haunted basement.

The doctor who treats you likens what you’ve got to “a bad hangover,” prescribes Tylenol.

You return to work, because the pamphlet says you should be good in two or three days. Here come the headaches, the sensation that your head is full of gauze, distortions in your periphery. You catch the start of people’s sentences, but by the time they get to the question you’re supposed to answer, or the thing you’re supposed to remember the next time you see your colleague or boss, you forget what’s been said. You still can’t read—the words on the page refuse each other like oil and water. So you fake it. When you do finally get reading back, you can’t recall what the paragraph is about when you get to the bottom. You can’t draw a clock. The numbers get all bunched up, 7 to 12 are crammed together like the condiments on a fridge shelf—and that is definitely not where 6 goes. Even your little nephew knows the 6. You walk outside on your lunch break, and the sun brings new hurt. The whooshing cars, screaming birds, the trash truck, snippets of chatter, lawnmower—it’s all a grind in your head. You have to cross the street because the guy in front of you is wearing a neon-patterned shirt. Your mother calls, you can’t listen to her for two minutes before nausea sets in.

You always thought migraines were an exaggeration, maybe even a romantic notion, and now you know that you were simply stupid and condescending in your illusion of your perfect, contiguous health. You give your supervisor a letter from your doctor indicating that the fluorescent bulbs are an impediment to doing your job; she looks at you askance. If you were a Black woman, that supervisor’s look would be outright suspicious, and maybe you couldn’t even get the doctor to give you a note. You don’t know how to tell your bosses that scrolling causes glitches in your brain, that the overhead lights make you wilt, that a gif brings on a wave of motion sickness. You are tempted to tell the leadership about the woman with migraines from Vineland, New Jersey, who is suing the Cumberland County Board of Social Services for not moving her desk to a window and for then firing her when she couldn’t work. But you can’t afford to lose this paycheck. So you take secret breaks in the supply closet, lying on the floor with damp office-kitchen paper towels draped over your eyes, then go home and wrap a blue scarf around your head. The tinnitus is always there in the background, a remix of buzz saw and elevator music. You’re sure this noise in your head is what is responsible for the...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668015544
ISBN 13 
9781668015544
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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