Left Neglected

Did you think this was going to be about politics? Nope. I just want to tell you about a book I read. It attracted and appealed to me on several levels.

Left Neglected is a novel about traumatic brain injury and a condition I absolutely empathize with (more about that in a minute). Author Lisa Genova presents the main character, Sarah Nickerson, as a hard-charging businesswoman who is distracting by cell phone use and runs off of the Massachusetts Turnpike. After the crash and during the months of recovery that follow, she has an epiphany about quality of life and embraces awareness and change.

As a result of the insult to the right hemisphere of her brain, Sarah suffers left neglect, a neurological condition where she doesn't understand that there is a left side to any view. This is not a vision problem (the occipital lobe is at the back of the brain), but a consciousness problem. The left side of her body and the left side of everything she's observing just doesn't exist in her thinking. Of course, this derails Sarah's life. In addition to her former 80-hour-a-week consultant agency career, she has a beautiful family: she is happily married with three young children. Their lifestyle - home in a Tony Boston suburb, second home in a Vermont ski area, kids in private schools - is unsustainable without her sizable income. The first-person story follows Sarah's denial and coming to terms with her disability as well as the lifestyle changes she must make.

If the brain trauma had been to the left hemisphere of her brain, she would have lost her ability to speak. I was attracted to this book, of course, because I am a speech-language pathology student and will be taking a course in traumatic brain injury this fall.

I'm also interested in this book because I'm a traumatic brain injury survivor. I also had a hemorrhage in the right parietal lobe, but this and other sub-cortical brain damage left me with hemiparesis and hemisensory loss. My left side tingles and twitches and experiences no sensation: the left side of my scalp, tongue, ear, neck; my left shoulder, wrist, fingers, breast, ovary, hip, knee, toes. It's so weird. You could draw a line down the middle of my body from head to two and mark the left side as weak and neglected of sensory awareness of hot, cold, pain, or pleasure. I have a condition known as spasticity, where the muscles of the left side are constantly in a state of contraction. So, while I am painfully aware of my left side, I can empathize with Sarah as she copes with the life-altering circumstances and comes to terms with disability. My life was altered a little over 35 years ago, though, and I am still coping and coming to terms.

Finally, I have to mention that this book is of interest to me on another level. The main character is a lot like mine in Waterfront Property. My Laura Callahan is a b-school grad who's wearing high heels and working 80-hour weeks. In her case, a visit from a lawyer is life altering. The information he relates takes her back to her family's land and history, and then, her epiphany is of an environmental sort. I wonder if Lisa Genova's literary agent will be interested? There's no way to know but to query. When I told my husband about this bright idea last night he queried me on what I'd do if she's interested. He knows I'm slammed right now with teaching and with grad school, not to mention a few dangling consulting jobs. We'll see. It's my TBI-related frontal lobe syndrome - impulsivity and lack of reasoning skill - that sends me tumbling forward.