I remember messaging my friend Gerard with a plan to head out after work. I remember closing my laptop and getting changed in a toilet cubicle. I remember attaching a spotlight to my helmet, and another smaller light to my handlebars. I remember zipping up my wet weather gear. I remember reading the weather forecast – wet, gale-force, a mid-winter shit-storm as only Wellington can put on. I remember messaging my partner and thinking at the same time that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, there would be other days, and that maybe I should just go home, watch TV, eat something warm, and drink something cold. I remember reading the return message, “Just be careful.” And then I don’t remember anything. Just a black hole where normally the rest of the evening would be.
It was 2016, two months before my first child was due to be born. I was in some kind of early-onset, mid-life, change-of-life, not-quite-ready-for-parenting-yet, self-denial sprint-to-nowhere. A lot of things were about to change, but also nothing was changing very quickly. I went to the pub, rode my mountain bike, signed up for races, jogged, worked late, booked holidays, bought new shoes. It felt normal, like my regular pre-child life, but even then, I knew I was trying to cram the fading light of my youth into a few short months before the baby was born. It was futile, but that made me even more desperate to cram more and more in.
Initially, it felt like the accident had happened to someone else, like it was all a joke and really I wasn’t even there at the time. But it didn’t happen to someone else. I had injuries, broken bones. I had a broken bike and missing parts. And I had the testimony of Gerard and my partner to fill in the gaps. I crashed on a track called Park Bench, which is known for being “off camber” and “rooty”. Gerard said the crash was a bad one and that he helped me down from the top of Mt Victoria and drove me to the hospital, one arm cradled in the other, like a newborn baby, the classic pose of a broken collarbone. I had grazes, a ripped shirt, my face and clothes were smeared with blood, mud, leaves and pine needles. But the most striking thing to all who saw me that night was the concussion: the disorientation, the short-term memory loss, how I didn’t remember a thing, and that it was ongoing. Every 10 minutes I’d forget everything I’d just been told.
The first thing I do remember for sure was the hospital bed, surrounded by a curtain, my partner Lindsay sitting quietly on a chair next to me. I remember the nurse coming in every 15 minutes to test my memory. I remember realising a few minutes after they arrived that I had met this person before, that I had heard these questions before, and that I had given these same answers before. I remember Lindsay looking worried as the nurse raised her eyebrows knowingly at her. And how I told her, for possibly the hundredth time, not to worry. And I remember how I told the same lame joke, over and over, after learning, over and over, how serious it all was. The phrase my addled brain kept returning to was, “I bet it was spectacular.”
At one point, late in the evening, when I was starting to feel a little less foggy, a doctor came in wanting to discharge me. I remember Lindsay protesting that I couldn’t possibly go home, and saying that I needed to be monitored by professionals. Later, I realised how worried and scared and stressed she must have been to even ask for that, let alone insist I stay overnight. Like me, she doesn’t rock the boat in the presence of experts, especially when they are busy and have other patients with greater needs. We both tend to walk out of the doctor’s office or the car repair shop with a list of questions we have been too agreeable to ask. I stayed the night at the hospital, with a nurse waking me up every hour or so to make sure I wasn’t deteriorating. The next day, with my short-term memory starting to return, I went home to start the months of rehabilitation and recovery.
An estimated 35,000 people get traumatic brain injuries every year in New Zealand. Traumatic meaning some kind of forceful impact to the head, like going over the handle bars of a mountain bike, for example. But then there are the “acquired” non-traumatic brain injuries. Which is an unusual term for things that include strokes and brain tumours, things that sound both horrendously traumatic and not something you’d go out of your way to acquire.
My grandmother had one of these. A healthy and fit 60-something, she was struck down with a severe stroke that left her partially paralysed and in a wheelchair. As with my situation, the most noticeable thing about the stroke was her brain injury, how she now had the personality of someone else. She had been intelligent, principled and hard working, with a bit of mystical hippie soul. But after the stroke, she became someone else, someone unrecognisable: cantankerous, childlike, angry, frustrated, violent and incredibly sweary.
To everyone else she was a different person, not even closely resembling the person she had been. That was obvious. But I’ve always wondered what she knew about this. Did she feel different? Or did she just have a nagging feeling that something was a bit off, a bit wrong? She was definitely angry, but who knows what she was really thinking, as she didn’t give much away. She had become a curious and dangerous stranger. It was like trying to understand the mind of a komodo dragon.
While recovering, I had the strange sensation of not being able to trust my own senses, and especially my own sense of myself. It felt like when you look out the window of a train as it starts to move and for a second the world is moving instead of the train. There’s a moment of panic, of disorientation, and then you realise it’s the train that’s moving. Which should be reassuring, but it comes with its own moment of disorientation and panic. Imagine that continuing on for the rest of your life, swinging back and forth between the train moving or the background moving. I’ve always wondered if my grandmother had this same sensation, swinging back and forth between knowing who she was and wondering who she was.
I am interested in writing about what makes a person a person, what makes me me, what makes you you. Am I different from you, or are we just the same person in a different skin? How can we ever know? In her book Consciousness, Susan Blackmore discusses a lot of the prevailing theories about consciousness before indicating her own thoughts, which essentially boil down to the idea that there is no stream of experiences, and all we have are fleeting events that give rise to a false impression of consciousness. We get tricked into thinking we are a static person, a self that other people identify with. Really, all we have is each moment, how we react to that, and what we do next. Which I like as an idea, but think was much better said by Silvio Dante when he says to Paulie in an episode of The Sopranos, “You’re only as good as your last envelope.”
As a writer, I want to know how the brain perceives language and how it transmits joy or anger or fun into words, how a writer’s brain can be translated onto the page, and how a reader perceives that and translates it into something meaningful in their own brain. I often hear people admire how clear and accurate a piece of writing is, like there’s nothing between them and the story. Which is certainly satisfying, but I also think there’s something else that can happen, which is to wallow in a lack of clarity. I often enjoy writing that admits it is rubbish at transmitting what one human is really feeling, really thinking, to another human. When it comes to language, I’ve always loved the moments of messy failure more than the moments of sublime success.
My partner has forgiven me for putting her through all that stress and worry. We now have two small children, and there’s not much I do that isn’t to serve their ever-increasing list of demands. I do still ride mountain bikes, although only on calm, sunny days. And as far as I can tell, I am fully recovered. For a while, I asked my partner fairly often if I seemed any different, hinting at long-term symptoms I had read about: Was I slower? More irritable? More forgetful? She always shrugged and answered with a remarkable lack of irritability herself. At some point, I stopped asking.
Now, when I forget things, I attribute it to the slow creep into middle age. When my brain feels like it’s wading through a foggy cloud, I attribute that to a lack of coffee. And when I’m irritable, it is because I haven’t been writing or doing enough exercise. And when I do sit down to write something, and invariably it feels awkward and inadequate, I keep going, pushing through to that point where I remember that this is exactly how I am supposed to be.
Bill Nelson’s Root Leaf Flower Fruit: A Verse Novel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) is out now.
