Thanks to Stacey at Preemie Experiment for pointing me to this video. Ellie, as some of you know, had a grade 3 Interventricular Hemorrhage, which is essentially a brain bleed, which if she were an older person and this happened would have been considered a stroke.
Jill Bolte Taylor's message is one of hope and something more in terms of the profoundness of her experience. She is a brain scientist and so studied her own stroke as it happened, and it sounded like a pretty bad one as it took 8 years for her to recover. It happened when she was 37. Don't get me wrong, what happened to Ellie is not the same, exactly but not entirely different either. Jill's story and insights into what happened to her are just so amazing. It made me wonder about Ellie's inner state and what she felt and went through. How her perspective on the world might be, probably is, different from your average bear. She emanates so much joy all the time, which I assume is the normal state of any 5 year old.
Anyway, if you have a person close to you recovering from a brain injury, this video certainly offers up an alternative and hopeful perspective. Jill's blog can be found here.
3 comments:
I watched the video the other night. It's amazing, isn't it.
I haven't watched the video (yet), but one of my greatest resources in my Charlie journey is my aunt. She suffered a stroke at the age of 36 and another one about a year later. She's wheelchair-bound and has difficulty speaking, but she also got her college degree and Master's degree since then. She help me SO MUCH in understanding the process of recovering from something like that.
Jacqui - it is amazing the mystical experience she had and in thinking about her golf ball size clot, the recovery she has had to be standing up giving such amazing speeches.
Bird - that is great that your aunt could shed light on what Charlie is going through - a kind of silver lining to all her suffering. I am glad she is able to go to school and has use of her brain! You gotta watch it all the more now!
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