Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [110]
Gabby knew exactly when you’re supposed to say “yes” versus “no.” After all, she comprehended almost everything. It’s just that, for some reason, she wasn’t able to deliver the word “yes.” Her father’s heart was in the right place, but he just wasn’t seeing the faulty circuits in his daughter’s brain.
“No, no, no, no, no . . . !” Gabby said the word about twenty times until Spencer backed off. I’d never seen her that angry with him. Gabby and her father always had a special bond, which had gotten ever stronger after she came home to run El Campo. Who could have imagined that they’d one day be at odds over the definitions of “yes” and “no”?
One day, a while later, Gabby and I were alone and she said to me, “Voice in my head.”
“Whose voice?” I asked her. She didn’t answer. She was struggling to find the words to explain herself, but couldn’t.
“Is it someone else’s voice?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” she said.
“Is it your voice?”
“Yes,” she said. “Hear my voice.”
“So you can hear your voice, but you can’t get your voice out. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Very frustrating.”
To ease her frustration, I tried my hardest to interpret what she meant when she used a wrong word or phrase.
“Room for pillow,” she said one night when we were in her hospital bed together. She was waving her hand over her head.
“Gabby, you have your pillow,” I said. In fact, there were multiple pillows and plenty of space for them on her bed. “Room for pillow!” she said several more times.
I was at a loss to figure out what she wanted, and she was growing more agitated about it. It went on for fifteen minutes of her saying “room for pillow” and me trying to guess what that could possibly mean.
Finally, it hit me. She wanted the head of her bed tilted backward. She couldn’t come up with the word “tilt.” I showed her the button to use to move her bed up and down, and then I blamed myself. “Gabby, it’s not you,” I said. “It’s me. I’m a moron.”
“Yes,” she said. “Moron.”
Because I knew Gabby so well, I didn’t always have to ask her to explain things. One day early in her hospitalization, I was home and needed to take a look at her online bank statement to make sure her mortgage was being paid. But I had a problem. I didn’t know her password and she wasn’t well enough yet to tell me. To get a new password, the bank’s website prompted me to reply to a few questions that Gabby had answered when she set up the account.
Question #1: “What is your favorite flower?”
What would Gabby have answered? I typed in “tulip.” That was correct.
Question #2: “Who is your best friend?”
“Raoul,” I typed. Correct again.
I was given a new password and breezed into Gabby’s records.
I later told her how easily I’d cracked her code. “You don’t have to tell me what’s in your head,” I said. “A lot of times, sweetie, I just know.”
Gabby’s doctors and nurses were patient in trying to help us understand brain science. They explained that some babies are born with half a brain and they grow up relatively normal. That’s because either side of our brain is capable of doing pretty much everything. The problem for adults is that it’s difficult to rewire a brain later in life. It’s doable, but it takes a lot more time. The brain’s ability to change itself is called “plasticity of the brain.” In Gabby’s case, the right side of her brain would need to pick up some functions that for forty years had been performed by the left. Her brain literally had to rewire itself, and that’s a slow, inexact, not-always-successful process.
Like many brain-injury patients, Gabby was often exhausted. An hour of speech or physical therapy took a lot out of her. Doctors explained that sleep helps the brain heal, and Gabby took seriously her need to rest. She slept thirteen or fourteen hours a day, then woke up ready for therapy. “Work, work, work,” she’d say.
There isn’t a lot of shiny, expensive equipment used to rehabilitate brain-trauma patients. In Gabby’s case, physical therapy often involved some white PVC piping