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.

Due to my battle with aphasia, I lost some of my ease with words. Many times when I am searching for a word, I feel like I am in a cold, dank and dark coal mine, bent over on my hands and knees crawling into the small crevices of my mind. When I get to the back of a crevice, I have to painstakingly claw through the mother lode of words that I find with a small pick and shovel for words to express my ideas. Although the images of what I want to say are very clear in my minds, the words I need to use to express those ideas are compressed into the hardened walls of my mind.

At other times,almost the opposite occurs. I find words or ideas jumping into my mind like Asian carp jumping out of a stream into boats when the stream is disturbed However, just like the Asian carp, once the words or ideas are in my mind, Idon’t know what to do with them. That’s why I carry a small notebook with me at all times, so I can write down these words and ideas, so that I can return to them when I am in a better position to do something with them.

The double entendre that I was trying to use in this posting is the phrase a deux. The first meaning of a deux comes from a French idiom for the phrase pas a deux, which means a dance for two. I believe the relationship between a patient and caregiver very closely resembles a dance for two. I will follow-up on this idea in another  posting.

The second meaning of a deux comes from the cinematic scene. Ever since the movies “Hot Shots” and “Hot Shots—Part Deux” became box office hits, Deux has come to be associated with the idea of a sequel. Thus, at this level, I mean for this posting and any other follow-ups to be sequels to my earlier posting “Gazing into the Abyss.”

In movie parlance, the word sequel can itself be a double entendre. A sequel can be a continuation of the first movie, picking up the story where the first move left it, or it can be an amplification of the first story. I intend my sequels to be an amplification of the original posting. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag–there will be more than one sequel.

As a result of the posting Gazing into the Abyss, several individuals have commented that I led them to the brink of personal abysses and left them looking into the black hole of themselves. That is definitely not what I intended. What I was trying to say in the last paragraph of the posting, was that one of the most important things I can do is stand on the edge of the abyss waving a yellow caution flag and yell: “Stop gazing into that abyss, or else it might start gazing back into you and begin to draw you into it.”

I am not alone in this task. Fortunately, through the close-knit communities of patients with aphasia and epilepsy and their caregivers, I have encountered a number of other individuals or groups that are working diligently to wave yellow flags and warn others. In several follow-up postings I will highlight two such individuals, with  blogs “Bendedspoon” and “Findingstrengthtostandagain.”

I will also do follow-up postings about two organizational or group blogs or websites. In case you can’t wait to get a head start on these last two categories, they are Aphasia Corner at <www.aphasiacorner.com> and the Epilepsy Foundation of America at <www.epilepsyfoundation.org.> (If you check out aphasicorner.com I invite you to read my essay that is featured in the lower right hand corner of the front page of one their issues and also available at <http://aphasiacorner.com/blog/living-with-aphasia-2/aphasia-friendly-words-are-more-like-cats-than-dogs-274>

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The whole quote is “Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” Most commentators suggest that Nietzsche was trying to say that if you spend too much time with evil, you will fall into evil.

I would like to suggest another possibility for those of us living with aphasia, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s, or for those who serve as our caregivers. Spending too much time concentrating on what has been taken away, can draw us deeper into the abyss of negativity and depression. I know from personal experience how easy it is to get frustrated when I can’t do things that I could previously do almost without effort. When that happens I have to shift gears and listen to the other voice that says but look at what you can do. You are a person. You are alive. You still have so much to offer others. One of the most important things we can do is to stand on the edge of that abyss and warn others so that they can avoid falling into it.

As he was examining my feet, he asked me why there was a small chunk out of the end of one of my toes. I sheepishly explained that I had done that while trying to clip my toenails. He stopped his examination and in a stern voice, with an even sterner expression on his face, he said, “Don’t you ever try to clip your own toenails again.” With a somewhat more friendly voice, he asked me how I trimmed my beard. I told him that I used an electric trimmer. He smiled and almost with a laugh said,”I wouldn’t recommend a straight razor or even a safety razor for you.” I thanked him for his concern. However, the seed was planted.

It didn’t break into bloom until this past week, when I spent two days in a hospital getting a pacemaker implanted into my chest. I am very fortunate to have received one of the new MRI compatible pacemakers, because with my history of brain problems, I will have many MRI’s in the future. In fact, one is scheduled for June. The doctors and nurses went over the big items on how to care for the new type of pacemaker before I was released—like don’t go through the airport security scanners, or even let the TSA workers pass a hand scan over the implant area, or don’t carry my cell phone or pda in my left front shirt or jacket pocket. I am not supposed to lean up against a microwave oven when it is operating and I am not supposed to operate a chainsaw, which I had stopped using before the pacemaker implant. I had also been somewhat uneasy about using my table saw or jigsaw, not knowing when a tremor was going to appear.

The pacemaker instruction booklet said that I am not supposed to be anywhere in the vicinity of a large magnet. I guess that takes away the possibility of me getting a job in an automotive salvage yard, picking up wrecks with the large magnet and dropping them into the crusher.

When my wife and I got home and we started reading the fine print in the instruction booklet, we were taken back at some of the instructions. They said to keep anything that used a base charger (magnets with no direct contacts) at least six inches away from the pacemaker site. It sent my wife scurrying to get a tape measure, because my cell phone, tooth-brush and rechargeable electric beard trimmer are base charged. If I hold my head up, and don’t droop it while I am brushing my teeth, it appears that I’m safe there. I will have to remember to use my cell phone with my right ear, which may complicate matters somewhat when I need to take notes since I am right-handed.

The beard trimmer is another matter. The neck line of my beard is much closer than six inches from the pacemaker site. If I have to give up my current beard trimmer, what am I supposed do? I then remembered the helpful suggestion of the podiatrist. I quickly decided against a straight razor or even a safety razor. It looks like my wife and I are going to have to go shopping for a plug-in razor-trimmer (not the rechargeable kind). In the meantime, the stubble on my neck and cheek has started to re-grow and it itches.