The 12/01/11 posting on FindingStrengthtoStandAgain’s Blog, “The Day the Wind Caught Fire” <http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/the-day-the-wind-caught-fire/#comments> is a must read for all individuals who have suffered a traumatic brain incident. The caregivers of these individuals should also read this inspiring posting.
I must admit my initial reaction to the title was that the posting was going to be about the Santa Ana winds and fires that are devastating parts of California currently. When I opened the post and saw the first picture, I was convinced that the posting was going in the direction of talking about wildfires. As I read the posting, I discovered that it was indeed about wildfires, but not the physical wildfires that scar our earth. It was about the internal wildfires which strokes or other traumatic brain incidents (TBIs) precipitate.
Those of us who have had a TBI and our caregivers know all too well about those wildfires. Tara is the epitome of a great teacher. She has had the courage to share her wildfires with us, so that we can learn from them. In this posting, she shares two lessons with us.
The first lesson relates to educating everyone about the after effects of a TBI. She correctly states each individual is different. She encourages everyone to work to see that the handbooks and guides given out to predict a TBI survivor’s outcome should not be one size fits all. We need to set our sights above those predictions, and remember everyone will progress differently. Each TBI affects a different area of the brain in different ways.
The second lesson struck home with me. Individual TBI survivors and their caregivers must have patience and take time to understand how the survivor’s “definition of normal will evolve.” I am still struggling to learn its implications in my life.
After spending 40 years in the academy immersed in analytical thinking, it was very difficult to wake up in the hospital after the removal of my brain tumor and find that I was now living in a metaphoric world. After all, metaphors were just the word pictures which you added to the end of your reports to help the uninitiated understand what you were trying to say. They were the icing that you put on the top of the cake that you baked in your analytical, sequential, deductive oven.
I have tried very hard to return to the analytic world and at times I find myself visiting it. I have not yet been able to make the warp jump into a more permanent return to the only world that I knew for 50 years. However, as I explore my new metaphoric world, I have found some very interesting things.
In James Geary’s book I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphors and How It Shapes the Way We See the World,” I discovered that “metaphors were a way of thought, long before they were a way with words.” From my study of learning theory, I should have known this. We learn by tying new and unknown things to old and known things. Metaphors are a comparison of something unknown with something we already knew. Understanding this, life in a metaphoric world became more tolerable. My normal evolved. I haven’t stopped striving to regain pieces of the analytic world I left behind, but I can now live peacefully in my new world and honor it.
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