By's Musings

Neurology

By 4 Comments

An important announcement concerning Higher Ed By Baylis LLC and By’s Musings

I begin this post with a very important announcement: Due to health considerations, I am taking a hiatus from Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, and temporarily suspending its operations until at least the beginning of 2015. I plan on continuing my blog By’s Musings, posting as often as I can.

I have been so preoccupied with a number of things that I didn’t realize that it has been six months since my last post. During those six months, I have had to deal with a number of health difficulties. In addition, I have also experienced myriad feelings which combined the negativity of sadness, frustration, burden and concern, with the positiveness of joy, determination, encouragement and hope. More on the health difficulties and the cloud of feelings later in this post, and probably in subsequent posts. I am keeping the website and name going so that I can pick up operations again when I am able.  One of my last posts was a December, 2013 post entitled  Update on my Health .

The seven months since that post have been a journey. The headaches that began in October have continued constantly since this post. The intensity and location of these headaches vary throughout each day. Although there is no universally accepted definition or explanation of referred pain, my medical team believes that some of the headaches are referred pain, that is pain that is originating in one place and being expressed as pain in another location. For example, recently I wrenched my left knee when my foot slipped off a curb and my lower leg buckled. After a few minutes of very sharp pain in my left knee, the knee pain went away. Almost immediately, my continuing head ache switched locations from my left temple area to the area above and behind my right ear and increased its  intensity from a “4” on the pain scale to a “6”.

In my December health post, I mentioned that an October 2013 MRI indicated a new growth in the hole left by the removal of the meningioma in March 2009. A follow-up MRI in December 2013 showed no change from the October 2013 MRI. In consultation with an oncologist, it was decided that the best approach in handling the new growth was a one-shot, mega-dose of radiation. That treatment was scheduled for March 2014, and went off without any glitches. However, within the next two weeks, I had two unscheduled trips to the hospital ER. On both occasions, I was admitted and spent a couple of days in the hospital. The two ER trips were only marginally related to each other and the radiation treatment. As a result of these stays, my hospital admission’s “rap-sheet” lists the following problems: TIA, localized seizure activity, dangerously high fever, unidentified infection, severe reaction to medications, and extreme exhaustion.

Following my second discharge, I started writing a follow-up to my April, 2013, post “Beware the Ides of March.” However, I ran into a number of road bumps and detours. The first was an eye infection which greatly limited my ability to read or write. Since mid-April, my online computer time has been limited to one hour a day. That’s hardly enough time for me to read and answer my normal, daily email traffic. Currently, I have a backlog of more than 1000 unanswered emails, many of them unread. This weighs heavily on my mind, as I am afraid I will begin to lose contact with people and higher education.

The above hints at the reasons for my feelings of sadness and frustration. I have been working on this post for a whole week.   In many ways, higher education moves slower than a snail. But, in some ways, things are changing daily, if not hourly. There is so much reading that one must do to stay current. In the midst of these health difficulties, my mind has not shut down completely. I have accumulated more than 400 ideas for blog posts and essays.

Whenever I attempted to use pen and paper to flesh out these ideas, I find myself needing a reference that is buried in the bowels of my computer. After a few minutes of digging, my eyes become too tired to focus properly. I shut the computer down. Fighting a headache, I try to turn off my mind and take a nap. This post has taken me more than four days to bring to completion.

So much for the negativity. To finish this post on a more positive note, I am determined to recover and return to work and writing. I am thankful for God’s protection and care through trying times. I have had a number of doctors tell me there are no medical or scientific reasons to explain why I am still walking and talking. I may not be back to my pre-tumor condition. I may never get all the way back to that position. However, I pray that I can live as Paul commanded the Philippians to live:

“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Phil 4:4, KJV),

or as the weeping prophet, generally assumed to be Jeremiah, wrote to the suffering Israelites,

“This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.  It is of the Lord‘s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.” (Lam 3:21-26 KJV).  

We should rejoice in the trying times as well as the good times, and seek Him at all times.

 

 

 

 

 

By Leave a Comment

The Edamame Menace – Part I

Please do not worry. This series of posts is not an attempt to create a sequel to the cult classic “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” These posts are my response to the growth of a boutique mentality that I see infecting much of today’s culture. The title is derived from a New York Times op-ed column entitled “The Edamame Economy,” written by David Brooks.

In his column Brooks chronicled the rise of a new fad in the hospitality industry, the boutique hotel. Even before I read Brooks’ column, I was composing a post I tenatively entitled “The Boutique Mentality.”  This post was inspired by a blog posting entitled simply “Boutique.” The post was written by John Assunto, President & CEO of The Hudson Group, a specialized, executive search and business coaching firm. “Boutique” was a combination commentary and advertisement for The Hudson Group and their process for helping educational institutions fill their C-level positions.

Brooks’ began his column by waxing nostalgic about a simpler day in travel dominated by railroads. He continues by giving the Hilton chain faint praise for creating a sense of familiar luxury experiences that are the same no matter where you travel. He also paid lip service to the discount hotel chains, down the street and around the corner, that provide you all you really need for a night’s stay at one third the price of the luxury suites in the upscale chain hotels. However, the boutique hotel provides a unique experience, usually at double or quadruple the price of the typical luxury suites.

Brooks explains his choice of the column title by noting that edamame is the pretentious name for soy beans. It signifies something distinctive and decidedly different from the common farm crop that is used as animal feed, the basic ingredient for a common milk substitute, cooking oil, and Oriental condiment.

Assunto’s post and ad for his executive search firm attempted to drive home the point that if you wanted the best, you had to deal only with the best. This idea carries to the extreme the logo of Mercedes Benz: “The best or nothing.” This mentality has infiltrated almost every aspect of today’s culture. This constant pressure is over-whelming organizations of all sizes and families from every socioeconomic status.

In future posts in this series I will speak to a threat that I believe The Edamame Menace poses for American family life, religious life, business enterprises, financial/industrial complex, health care industry and higher education.  In the meantime, I leave you with the lyrics from an 1848 Shaker Hymn, “Simple GIfts, normally attributed to Elder Joseph Brackett:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend, we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

By 10 Comments

Update on My Health

Friends, it’s been three months since my last post. It’s been a much longer absence than I intended. Three months may actually be the longest dry spell of writing in my entire career, not just my time as a blogger. I can’t ever remember any three month interval in which I did no serious or significant writing. It has been like I am in a boat, stuck in the middle of a lake, and I lost the winds in my sails. However, it is not as if I had run out of ideas on which to write. During those three months, I accumulated a list of more than 200 potential ideas for posts. However, during this period, whenever I sat down at my computer to write, something would happen and I could never finish my thoughts. Sometimes as I started to write, I couldn’t decide on the approach I needed to take to bring out the important aspects of the subject at hand. At other times, I would get into a topic and I found it had a mind of its own. It started going in a direction I didn’t want to go and I had to shut it down.

I finally decided to step up to the plate and follow the advice that, for years, I gave to scores of institutions that were struggling in the beginning stages of assessment programs. I would tell institutions to just pick an area and an approach, and then attack it. I would also suggest that after that first task was finished, the institution should celebrate its victory. The institution should then pick another topic, and go after it.  You make progress one topic at a time.

The first topic on which I have decided to write is an update on my health. I offer this posting, not as an excuse for the recent scarcity of posts, but as a partial explanation of my pain. It is also a request for your prayers and thoughts. The past five years have clearly taught me that God is a God of miracles, and not a God of my convenience. If not for the grace of God, I would not be writing anything. I have had six doctors in six different specialties tell me that there are no scientific or medical reasons to explain why I am still walking and talking, or even breathing.

After a life of excellent health, the past five years have been a long, trying journey. During this period, I have picked up a long list of problems which began with the rescission of a benign meningioma. This list of current conditions includes a mild case of aphasia, epilepsy,  abnormal involuntary movement (tremors), disturbed sensory perception (dysesthesia), organic hallucinosis (sensory hallucinations), fatigue, attention or concentration deficit, and mental status changes. These are complicated by another somewhat smaller list of conditions that I have picked up over the past ten years, independent of the brain tumor. This list includes atrial fibrillation and obstructive sleep apnea. Taken collectively these conditions have complicated my life and forced me to retire from full-time work within the academic world.

This fall as I strove to get my proposed coaching/consulting business, Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, and this blog, By’s Musings, off the ground, I have encountered some additional complications. Since the onset of my epilepsy four years ago, my seizures have been controlled by medication. However, earlier this fall I became concerned as I experienced several incidents of sensory overload, brought about by loud noise, quickly changing lights and my cross sensory perceptions. The confluence of these sensory experiences seemed to take me to the precipice of seizures. I developed intense headaches, became nauseated and momentarily lost track of where I was.

The intensity and frequency of headaches increased throughout the early fall until they reached their peak in mid-October. Thus, for the past eight weeks, I have experienced continuous headaches. The only things that change are intensity and location. I wake up with them in the morning. They wax and wane between “four” and “eight” on the normal ten-point pain scale. The headache moves around my head, fading out in one location, as it fades in at another location. As I wrote this paragraph, I found myself engaged in a metaphysical and grammatical argument: Am I experiencing one headache and I should use singular nouns and verbs; or is it many different headaches and I should use plural forms?

In an attempt to find answers, my neurologist ordered a DAT scan to determine if the tremors were related to the possible onset of Parkinson’s disease, and an MRI to determine if there have been any changes within my head. The DAT scan was negative. The good news from that report is that the tremors are not related to Parkinson’s disease. The bad news is the test doesn’t tell them what is causing the tremors. The results of the MRI were a little less positive. There is still a hole in my head where the tumor had been. There is still scar tissue approximately the size of a dime on my right frontal lobe where the tumor had been attached. Unfortunately, the new MRI showed some swelling in the surrounding area, along with a very small new growth within the hole. My neurosurgeon says that the growth and swelling are not extensive enough to be causing my headaches and other problems. However, any abnormalities in the brain area must be watched. Thus, I will have another MRI in three months. Depending upon the results of that MRI, it could be followed possibly by additional MRI in another three months to monitor the growth and swelling.

I know that God can heal me and I pray that He will do so. However, if God decides to do something else, I pray that I will be able to stand with Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Job and say, ” My God is able to deliver me from these medical problems. If he does, the glory goes to Him. However, if He doesn’t, I will still serve Him. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Please pray this prayer with me.

16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. 17 If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. 18 But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Daniel 3:16-18, KJV)

20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, 21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:20,21, KJV)

By 2 Comments

Which Came First: Visual Thinking or Aphasia?

Does the old conundrum (“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”) really have an answer? One can argue sequentially that to have an egg there must first be a chicken to lay the egg. However, from where did that chicken come? All of today’s chickens come from eggs that were laid by other chickens. The most recent announcement (October 2009) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration claims that no chickens have been cloned. Thus, we can still ask, “Which came first, chicken or egg?”

I’m asking this question because I have noticed that there is a one-to-one correspondence between my struggles with words and my thinking in terms of pictures. On the other hand, when I am operating in a verbal thinking mode, I have much more facility with and memory of words.

In my sequential thinking mode, I find myself asking the question,”Which comes first: visual thinking or aphasia?” In this sequential thinking mode, I am really asking the question: “Does one condition cause the other?” In my visual thinking mode, I am trying to construct a story board. So which picture panel do I include first in my story?

I realize that my case is very unusual. My brain tumor was in the meninges in the right frontal lobe area. The small hole in my brain and the scar tissue caused by the removal of the benign tumor are in that right frontal lobe area. Although it is known as the executive brain, it is not the normal area associated with language.

Immediately after my surgery I noticed a decreased facility with words. I generally understood what people were saying. Almost all of the time, I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the right words to use. This deficiency was much more pronounced in oral exchanges. When I was writing, I had more time to come up with the right word.

When I would mention the battle that was going on in my mind, many people would remark that they could not see that difficulty in my responses. However, I knew it was there. I also knew that I was answering questions by using a preconstructed story board and a previously prepared script. Ad lib responses were slow and not always on point.

For six months following the surgery, I went through extensive speech therapy for the aphasia. Month by month, I noticed slight but continual improvement until I finally reached the point that therapist’s evaluations showed that I was in the above normal range for my age group. This meant that the insurance company would no longer pay for therapy.

However, three months after the speech therapy stopped, I had a serious setback. I experienced four tonic-clonic seizures within a 30-minute time span. I lost consciousness the moment of the first seizure, and I did not wake up until four days later in the hospital. When I did regain consciousness, I immediately knew several things were different. I had lost many of the gains in the use of words that I had achieved through the speech therapy. I also realized that I was vacillating between two modes of thinking. The first mode was a verbal, analytic, quantitative, sequential mode, which had been my normal mode prior to the surgery. The second mode was a visual, metaphoric mode which was brand new to me.

It was immediately back to speech therapy. This time my progress was spotty. Some days were much better than others. It all depended upon which thinking mode I found myself in. When I was in the verbal mode, my performance on the therapist’s assessments was good enough, so that five months after the seizures my insurance company again said that therapy was no longer necessary.

Shortly after the therapy stopped for this second time, the tremors and hallucinations started. One year after the first tremors and hallucinations, the dysesthesia started. I realize that my aphasia is far from the usual forms of aphasia. For more than one year, I have been battling the aphasia, tremors, hallucinations, dysesthesia, and visual thinking. These conditions are not universally present. However, when they are present, I have noticed that verbal, analytic, quantitative, and sequential thinking is much more difficult. Complicating things is that the tremors occur almost at random. They are not associated with either thinking mode, or the aphasia, hallucinations or dysesthesia.

Again, the question: “Which came first: visual thinking or aphasia, hallucinations and dysesthesia?” However, in reverting to analytic thinking for a moment, are these factors occurring simultaneously because there is a third factor that is causing these two observable factors?

In the meantime, I know that if I am fighting hallucinations and dysesthesia, the visual thinking is not too far behind, and vice verse. Although I know that I can write in either mode, verbal or visual thinking, it is easier when I’m in verbal mode. Sometimes I can’t wait for the verbal mode to show up, so I plow ahead writing in the visual mode.

 

By Leave a Comment

Living in the World of Visual Thinking

I can’t believe tha it’s been almost two years since I published the post Living in a Metaphoric World and Trying to Communicate with the Academy.  Although many things have changed, many have remained the same. In October 2011, I was living almost exclusively in a metaphoric and visual thought pattern world. Over the two intervening years, I have worked very hard to regain some of my life in the verbal, analytic, quantitative, and sequential thought world. Today in August 2013, the best I can say is that “Some days are better than others.”  This, of course, drove me to the U2 song, Some Days Are Better Than Others, particularly the verse

Some days it all adds up
And what you got is not enough
Some days are better than others.

When faced with any question, situation, or problem, my thinking still immediately goes to a picture or a scene. Prior to my TBIs, I would have attempted to formulate a verbal description, before piecing together a verbal, analytic, quantitative, sequential explanation or solution. Today, I begin with a picture around which I build a scene. I will then put together a storyboard, and eventually a script. It is as if I am scripting and directing a movie.

Some of my movie productions are visual travelogues, focusing on the scenery. Other productions are closer to documentaries, where I attempt to present a verbal description of what I see. In these I attempt to translate the pictures into words.  However, to use words, you have to have a ready supply of words. Here is where I experience the down side of aphasia. Sometimes I must struggle to find the best word. I know what I want to say because I see the pictures. Nevertheless, the right words don’t leap out at me as they used to do. It takes me back to one of my first posts, Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs.

One criticism of living in a movie, is that one is always living in a fantasy, a make-believe world. It is not real. Having lived in this fantasy land now for more than two years, I would counter that living in a world of words, analysis, numbers and sequence, is not living in the real world either. The words, analysis, numbers and sequences are only representations of the real world. If analogies congeal into dogmas, metaphors and pictures are easily mistaken for reality. C.S. Lewis said that the danger of using a metaphor is not that it may be wrong, but that people forget it is an analogy and not necessarily reality.

Which is the better description of reality? Having been a resident of both worlds, my answer would have to be, “It depends!” James Geary, New York Times Bestselling author of “I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World” gives us an answer. The answer is that it depends upon the audience. In his book Geary introduces us to the concept of expectancy bias. Individuals bring their own biases to bear upon any communication. Those differing expectations will cause individuals to create their own interpretations of your story. However, you can help lead individuals in particular directions by the  words, analyses, numbers, sequences, pictures, and metaphors that you select.

What’s left to say? Quiet on the set! ACTION!

By Leave a Comment

An Unexpected Joy

One of my favorite bloggers, Tara Fall, in a recent series of posts on her blog “Finding Strength To Stand Again” raised the topic of resiliency. She did it with the seemingly benign question of whether there is something in some people that makes them more resilient than others.

One of the unexpected joys that I have experienced with my aphasia is the excitement of discovering new words or rediscovering lost words. When I read Tara’s post “Question and Answer Week 2-b,”  the word resilient just jumped off the screen at me. My immediate reaction was I know that word from my recent battles with epilepsy, hallucinations, dysenesthesia, and aphasia. However, I also had a feeling that I was missing something. My academic background kicked in and I started researching the concept of resiliency.

Very quickly, I realized what had bothered me with the word “resilient.” A number of different definitions are in common use. I found this somewhat ironic in that the same day I read Tara’s post, I became part of a discussion thread that involved academics and professional people from all over the world. The thread began with the question, “What is a professor?”

Immediately people jumped into the discussion arguing about whether the word represented a title or a job position. In the course of the thread, as happens so often in academic discussions, some one raised the question about the difference between colleges and universities. At this point a contributor suggested that what we needed were certain words with “reserved definitions” so that confusions like this would be avoided. My reaction was, “That would be nice, but it isn’t going to happen.”

Returning to the word resilient, the first use that came to my mind was the ability to take a blow or weather the storm and bounce right back up. The victim comes back stronger than before. We see it in television commercials and news reports all the time. We are reminded of the 9/11 tragedy and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Immediately after the Boston Marathon Bombing, news reports, especially sports reports, highlighted the idea of being Boston-strong. Every evening, we are reminded that the New Jersey shore is open again for tourists, because “we’re stronger than the storm.” We’ve seen the same sentiment in New Orleans and Oklahoma.

What were the other definitions and questions that were running around in my head? The first involved the research that I had done about the idea of neuro-plasticity in relation to my situation. In my readings I found a number of scientists who said that my condition “was what it was, and I should learn to live with it.” Other scientists said that it was possible for people to change their brains to relearn skills or learn new skills to replace the ones that were lost. In a sense, this was a type of recovery. However, the scientist took great pains to emphasize that it wasn’t the former individual. In a real sense, it was a new individual. This is a slightly different view of resiliency. It still holds some hope for victims that they can become new individuals with new skills that in some sense may replace the ones that they lost. However, they will not be their “old selves.”  They will be someone different with different strengths and skills.

Many of the neuroscientists  I read concerning brain plasticity, referenced a new growing science of resiliency. As I researched this, I found it has quite a following among environmentalists, entomologists, and medical researchers studying bacteria and viruses. For these scientists, the primary idea is that one species or environmental state changes or evolves in ways that ensure the survival of the species or environmental state. Resiliency refers to the survival of the whole, not the survival or well-being of the individual. I am still trying to figure out what this has to do with neuro-plasticity.

More research on resiliency lead me to a fourth definition. This definition came from the popular psychologists associated with Psychology Today. In a series of posts they suggested that pyschology has identified factors that make some people resilient, while others wilt under pressure. The resilience factors were an optimistic outlook on life. These individuals are almost always positive. They have the power to regulate their emotions. This struck me hard. Prior to my TBI, I was always known as being even keeled, with my emotion under control. After the TBI with damage to my right temporal lobe, I have much more trouble controlling my emotions. I erupt much more easily. The third attribute of resilient people was that they could accept criticism  well, and could see failure as a form of helpful feedback. When Edison was asked if he was discouraged when experiment after experiment failed when he was trying to invent the light bulb, his answer could have been the battle cry of the resilient ones: “Of course not. I now know a thousand things that won’t work. I will soon find the one that works.”

But I wasn’t done with resiliency. Some lines from a hymn kept playing in my head. As usual, I had only part of the words, so I had to do a search to find the hymn. The words that were echoing in my head were, “When sea billows roll.,” I was more than slightly embarrassed when I discovered it was one of the most popular hymns of all of Christianity, “It Is Well with My Soul.”  

The words of the first stanza are

When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know [say], It is well; it is well with my soul.

The story behind this hymn involves a tragic sea accident. The words were written by Horatio Spafford just after he got a telegram from his wife informing him that only she was safe. She had to tell him that all four of his children were killed when the ship on which they were traveling to Europe sank. Spafford was a modern day Job. Almost everything he loved was taken from him. His response was “Praise be to God.”

I don’t believe that it is inherent to us. It is a gift of a loving father to his children. If we accept God’s grace, we like Job can say,

…, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ (Job 1:21 KJV)

This final type of resiliency is a resiliency built upon faith in a power outside of ourselves. I have seen it my life. I can truly say, “We serve a God of miracles, not a God dedicated to our convenience.” We should reply with our tears, like the father asking Jesus to heal his sick child. When asked if he believed,  the father replied,

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24b KJV)

“Lord, give me your resiliency. Help me in my unbelief.”