A Different Point of View

Dear Diary,

Tragedy struck my family, on June 28^th, 2000. My father was involved in a car accident while coming home from a business trip. It was late at night and he was only thirty minutes from home when another car struck his. His Jeep Cherokee rolled over several times before stopping in a ditch. The other driver was drunk and was not hurt by the crash. My dad, however, suffered severe head trauma. Luckily he was wearing his seatbelt; otherwise he would not be alive today, according to the paramedics.

At first, my mom and I were just so relieved that he was alive. The doctors in the emergency room made it sound like he was going to die when they first talked to us. They said he had received a serious blow to the head and were not sure of the amount of brain damage he had received, if any. The waiting was the worst part of it. We didn’t know if he was going to make it through the night, or the next day, or the next week. But my dad is strong, and he recovered from his injuries quickly.

It was only after he was released from the hospital and came home that mom and I realized that he might not be all right. Dad remembered everything that happened and knew who he was and where he was, but he was no longer my dad! It was like his personality had totally changed!!! Some days he would not go to work. The days he did, he usually got sent home early because he could never get things done. He used to be a successful stockbroker, but now he is listless and gets distracted easily.

So Mom took Dad to a psychiatrist, but they could find nothing wrong with him. We were then referred to a specialist who did many more tests and determined that Dad had suffered enough brain damage to the frontal lobes of his brain that part of them no longer functioned properly. He told us that this was why Dad was acting so strangely; it was because he could no longer act normally, even if he tried.

Very little of what he said made sense to me, so I started doing my own research into the human brain. What I have found has amazed me!! I have been reading a book called Descartes’ Error: emotion, reason, and the human brain by Antonio Demasio, and the information it contains is astounding. My dad’s case is not the first of its kind. Of course, if it were, the doctors would not have been able to diagnose what is wrong with him. Demasio talked about several different cases of people with different forms of brain damage, but the one that interested me the most was the one about a man named Elliot.

Elliot developed a brain tumor that was pushing down on his frontal lobes. Although it was not malignant, it was life-threatening and required surgery to remove. When the surgeons took the tumor out, a little of Elliot’s brain was removed too. He recovered fully, but his behavior was altered. "He needed prompting to get started in the morning and prepare to go to work. Once at work he was unable to manage his time properly." After several tests "Elliot emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters." This situation sounded eerily similar to how my dad is now.

As I read on, I learned some things that were very disturbing. Elliot had been married, and had children, but because of his new state of mind, his family could no longer put up with his behavior. His wife divorced him. This worries me a lot because of my present situation. What will happen to my family? Will my mom be able to cope with everything? Unfortunately, nowhere in the book did it give advice for the families of victims of brain damage.

While it is important to understand what is happening in the brain and how human behavior is affected, I think it is just as important to develop ways for people to cope with brain damage, in them and in others. It is not enough to know that "the amygdala plays a role in emotion" unless we can further study it and determine how damage to it can be overcome.

I think sometimes people look at a situation on too minute of a scale and don’t put things into context. For instance, Damasio gives many cases of people suffering from brain damage and goes into great detail as to what was wrong with them, but for all of his knowledge on the subject, he cannot offer any advice for those poor people and their families. But maybe we are not meant to know the answers to some things. The brain stores all of our knowledge for us, but perhaps it cannot store certain knowledge about itself, or if it can, maybe we are not meant to have access to that knowledge. It is rather ironic that each of us contains one of the most intricate and complicated things imaginable, but we are not able to figure out how the human brain works, even with its help.