Monahan Brown - Stroke: a 5% chance of survival

Ricky Monahan Brown suffered a massive haemorrhagic stroke in 2012. During recovery, he realised he had stories to tell. His writing has subsequently been published in books, magazines, journals and newspapers. He received a Stroke Association Life After Stroke Award for Creative Arts in 2016, and lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their son.

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

Scotland

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright Ricky Monahan Brown 2019

Editor: K.A. Farrell

The moral right of Ricky Monahan Brown to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Translation of Honami Ketsu poem reproduced by kind permission of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBNe: 978-1-912240-45-6

Cover design by Mark Swan

Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

For you, Pickle. Obvs.

As I write in these pages, many survivors of strokes, brain haemorrhages and brain injuries have stories about their experiences that have been practiced many times. We find our way to narratives that make some sort of sense of those experiences and our losses. Ive tried my best to tell my story accurately in a way that makes sense to me. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to preserve anonymity, and a composite character or two appears herein. Throughout most of this story, my brain is broken, and I hope youll make allowances for that.

Like all the best boy meets girl, they fall in love, boy suffers catastrophic brain injury stories, this one started on a normal day. My girlfriend Beth and I had arranged to take my ten-year-old daughter on a playdate with a schoolmate to the New York Hall of Science. Six hundred eccentrics were displaying their glorified high school science projects as part of the World Maker Faire, among them an amateur mad scientist who was presenting his Zombie Detector Machine.

The detector worked simply enough. Professor Frankenstein read a set of simple questions from his script. Have you travelled abroad in the past year?

Yes. We visited my father in Edinburgh in February.

He tapped away at the machine. Have you recently suffered any bites?

We were in New York, and it was September. Im almost certainly being bitten by a mosquito right now!

Tap-tap-tap.

And do you ever experience a craving for brains?

Since I seemed to be in enough trouble already, I figured that I might as well admit to a regular craving for haggis from a butcher just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and all the warm-reeking, gushing entrails that might involve. Besides, Beth and I were vegetarians, so the haggis we would actually order was meat-free and my admission of having eaten haggis around the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath (or, as we would have it in New York, Tartan Day) was no worse than an admission that I might have been eating kidney bean brains. Even if that would be two sets of organs for the price of one.

Frankenstein handed me a lightweight metal box and instructed me to press a button. When the button was pressed, the front of the box would light up to spell out either the word HUMAN or the word ZOMBIE, and the participant, applicably labelled, would show up on the monitor included in the exhibit.

My answers added up to only one conclusion. The blood was daubed on the wall I was a ZOMBIE.

Beth was HUMAN, but my daughter Elizabeth was a ZOMBIE, too, so I wasnt too concerned about my diagnosis. In fact, being a practically invincible member of the undead army could have been seen as a boon. For a start, there were more life and death scenarios to be navigated at the Faire.

Elizabeth and I climbed into a submarine simulator, within which a pair of participants had to complete a set of instructions and tasks press this button, spin that wheel to avoid having a load of water dumped on them. Not exactly the Lusitania, I thought to myself, but it was certainly a bit soggy. In the end, even that was neither here nor there, as a rainstorm opened up over Queens and we were all soaked to the skin soon enough.

That was the last time I felt rain on my cheek the way a person is supposed to.

The Hall of Science and its grounds began to empty, and the three of us got the subway back to Brooklyn. We dropped Elizabeth off with her mother, a drive-by drop off, since my estranged wife and I had been separated for over two years. Our divorce had been sliding towards the acrimonious, and most of our conversations would end with her calling me an asshole.

We left all that behind, returned home to pick up our pink Malaguti scooter, and rode out to Red Hook for a game of pool in a quiet little bar. We hit the back room and had a couple of beers while sinking a few balls. Although I had recently been labelled as one of the undead, my hand-eye coordination held up pretty well, and we halved four games. We whiled away some more of the early evening chatting with the motorcycle-loving proprietors, and by the time we were pulling our helmets on to head back to South Park Slope, Beth and I were convinced we were the coolest, most charming couple in the borough, what with our sexy moped, our pool skills, our bar-owning, hog-riding friends, and a skinful of beer. We luxuriated in each others company a little longer, and headed to Tobys to share some pizza and a couple of large glasses of Italian red. An excellent meal, in lovely company, that fully deserved to be rounded off by a quick smoke, so, as was our wont, we idly chatted over a couple of Parliaments in the late summer air before heading home.

It could hardly have been a more pleasant day. I was able to forget for a moment that the previous day I had been sacked from my job as a financial lawyer in Midtown Manhattan; that other than to visit my mother in hospital and return for her funeral, I hadnt been back home to Scotland for years; that my ex-wife Linda was probably right I was a bit of an asshole. It was good to live in the moment for a moment.

Back at the flat, as I had sex for what would soon seem to be the last time, I couldnt have been more in the moment. For her birthday, I had made Beth a piece of art that listed 32 general things I liked about dating her on one side. On the other side, it listed 32 things I liked about our lovemaking. The feel of her skin was thing 12 on one side, and things 5 and 28 on the other.

Tonight, it felt like a million butterfly wings caressing my flesh.

It wasnt unusual for me to be short of breath after a session. Or to be so awash with dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin and other naturally occurring uppers and downers that I would feel nauseous. An inability to string together an articulate thought in the aftermath of our lovemaking was nothing odd. In short, for me to be so intensely affected by our sex that I would complain of feeling weird on this particular day would not be strange.

Honey, Ive got a weird feeling in my left-hand side.