Hello stranger, p.5
Hello Stranger, page 5
I felt a rising comprehension. Had I been like this all week?
As crazy as this sounds, it’s true: It was only once I really started trying to look that I realized I couldn’t see.
“Sue?” I said again, blinking, like maybe I could clear things up that way.
“You look fantastic,” she said, leaning forward and clasping my hands in hers. “You’d never know they just popped a section of your skull out like the top of a jack-o’-lantern.”
Yep. That was Sue, all right.
“I expected you to be bald, to be honest,” she went on. “I was prepared to walk in here and say you looked better bald. I had a whole Sinéad O’Connor–themed speech prepared.”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to look at her again.
But no change.
“How did they manage to keep your hair?” Sue asked.
I knew the answer to this question. Dr. Estrera had shown me in detail. But it didn’t seem that important right now.
“I think I have a problem,” I said then. “I can’t see you.”
Sue waved her hand in front of my face, like, Hello? “You can’t see me?”
“I can see your hand,” I said. “I just can’t see your face.”
Sue leaned forward, like that might help, just as the nurse leaned in and said, “Are you having trouble with your eyes, sweetheart?”
“I don’t think it’s my eyes,” I said. “I think it’s my brain.”
* * *
WITHIN TWO HOURS, I’d done another MRI, and the entire faceless team of Estrera, Thomas-Ramparsad, Montgomery himself, and a whole posse of residents and onlookers had gathered in my room.
“The imaging shows some edema around the surgical site,” Dr. Estrera said, talking more to my dad than to me.
“What’s edema?” I asked.
“Swelling,” Dr. Nicole explained. “Very normal. Nothing to worry about.”
“It’s common to have some swelling after a procedure like this,” Dr. Estrera confirmed.
Then he turned to me, and as he did, I looked down at the blanket on my bed.
Looking at faces—or the modern art pieces where faces used to be—was hard. It made my brain hurt a little. Fortunately, Dr. Estrera wasn’t offended. He went on. “As an artist, you know that the human face has a lot of variability.”
Not sure you needed to be an artist to know that, but okay.
“Penguins, for example,” he said, “don’t have that same amount of facial variability. Most penguin faces look pretty much the same.”
“I wonder if the penguins would disagree,” I said.
He went on, “The location of your cavernoma was very close to an area in the brain called the fusiform face gyrus…”
He waited to see if I’d heard of it.
I hadn’t.
“It’s a deep temporal structure—a specialized area of the brain that allows people to recognize faces.”
I nodded and kept my eyes on my blanket.
He went on. “Humans have evolved highly specialized brain systems for recognizing faces, and most of us have near-photographic memories for them. The minute you see another human face, it triggers a flood of instant information about that person: name, profession, biographical data, memories you have together … and the fusiform face gyrus is crucial to that process.”
I nodded, like, Interesting. Like he was just telling me random brain facts.
Then he said, “Your cavernoma was located close to the FFG. Not in it and not touching it, but close.”
“Did you nick it or something? That’s why it’s not working?”
Dr. Estrera turned my MRI scan on the lightboard and circled on a gray area. “We believe the normal postsurgical swelling is pressing on the fusiform face area right next to it and causing some mayhem.”
“Causing some mayhem” seemed like a rather cutesy way to describe my situation, but I let it go. “What can we do about it?” I asked. “Ice it, maybe? Take some ibuprofen? Stop drinking water for a while and dehydrate myself?”
“There’s not much we can do about it,” Dr. Estrera said. “We just have to wait.”
“Wait?!” I didn’t have time to wait. “For how long?”
“People can vary quite a bit,” Dr. Estrera said pleasantly, like we were just chitchatting. “I’d say it’s likely to resolve in two to six weeks.”
Two to six weeks? I looked up. “I’m looking at you right now, and you’re like an upside-down Mr. Potato Head. Are you saying my brain could be doing that for six weeks?”
“I’m hoping it’ll resolve before that,” he said. “Assuming it does resolve.”
I felt a sting of adrenaline. “Assuming it does resolve?” I echoed. “Are you saying it might not resolve?”
“I think it’s very likely to resolve. Most postsurgical edema does. I can’t guarantee it, of course. But I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”
Okay, okay. “But assuming it resolves … what happens then? Everything goes back to normal, right?”
“Then…” Dr. Estrera said, “we’ll see.”
Come on, man!
He must’ve thought he was striking a balance between being comforting and not making promises he couldn’t keep. But since the possibility that it might not resolve hadn’t even occurred to me, he was absolutely doing the freaking opposite.
“I just don’t understand,” I said then, my panic making me a little breathless, “how you could explain every minuscule head-clamp detail to me, and every aspect of the hair-sparing technique, but somehow fail to mention that the brain surgery I just electively signed up for might ruin my ability to see faces.”
“This is a very rare outcome,” Dr. Estrera said.
“I thought you said it was totally normal!”
“Edema is normal,” he said. “But your cavernoma just happened to be very close to this particular very specialized area. The chances of this happening were infinitesimal.”
“Do you know what I do for a living?” I demanded.
The whole room waited. They did not.
My voice was rising, but I didn’t notice. “I am a portrait artist. I paint portraits! Of faces! For a living! What am I supposed to do now? What happens to my livelihood? I need my fusiform face thingy to be working!”
In the silence that followed, Dr. Estrera nodded with an apologies-for-the-inconvenience vibe.
I sighed.
I looked over at Dr. Nicole’s puzzle-piece face for some help—emotional or otherwise.
“There’s no reason that it shouldn’t resolve,” she said, taking my hand. “We’ll just be patient. And I will work with you to teach you some coping skills in the meantime.”
I let out a long breath. “Can I still go home tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Dr. Estrera said. “Your site is healing beautifully. There’s no reason for you to remain here.”
My dad had been worryingly silent. I took a minute to note the unexpected high I’d been getting from being an accidental brain surgery poster child—a sudden minor celebrity in his world.
But then, when he shook Dr. Estrera’s hand and left the room without a word to me, that high dropped to the ground.
Looked like it was time to be a disappointment again.
Oh well.
* * *
THE MOMENT OF truth came later, after most of the doctors, including my dad, had left.
Dr. Nicole stayed to run me through some face recognition tests. Before we got started, I needed to pee. Which meant going to the bathroom. Which, of course, had a mirror above the sink. I avoided looking as I walked in, but as I headed out, I paused.
What would happen if I looked into that mirror?
What would I see?
Don’t look, I told myself.
I didn’t want to know, but I also couldn’t stand not knowing … and so I wound up standing with my eyes averted, caught between curiosity and dread, for so long Dr. Nicole finally asked if I was all right.
The knock startled me, and then I coasted off that energy and glanced up into the mirror to check my reflection …
And what I saw made me gasp.
My face, my very own face, the one I’d had and known and lived with all my life … it was nothing but puzzle pieces, too.
* * *
WHEN I OPENED the bathroom door, moving in slo-mo with the shock, I kept my eyes pointed toward the floor, which felt like the safest place. I got as far as the threshold before slowing to a stop.
“Sadie?” Dr. Nicole asked.
“I can’t see my own face,” I said then, a little breathless. “I just checked in the mirror, and it’s not there. I’m faceless.”
But Dr. Nicole wasn’t giving in to my drama. “You’re not faceless,” she said, steering me gently by the shoulders back to bed, “you just have edema.”
I wanted to be practical about it. Matter-of-fact. I wanted to fully understand that this was just a little brain glitch.
But there was nothing matter-of-fact about it.
I walked away from that mirror feeling … lonely.
No matter how alone you ever are in life, you always have yourself, right? You always have that goofy, imperfect face that forgets to take off its mascara before bed and wakes up with raccoon eyes. That one crooked lower tooth that the orthodontist never could manhandle into place. Those ears that stick out a little too far. Those lines on either side of your smile that always look like parentheses. That slight dimple at your chin that’s just like your mom’s.
Of course those aren’t the only things that make you you.
You are also your whole life story. And your sense of humor. And your homemade doughnut recipe. And your love for ghost stories. And the way you savor ocean breezes. And the appreciation you have for how the colors pink and orange go together.
You’re not just your face, is what I mean.
But man, it sure is a big part of you.
Like your shadow. So faithfully and constantly with you, you don’t even notice it.
It’s just always there. But then one day it’s gone.
Except it’s not just the shadow that’s gone. It’s the person making the shadow.
You. You’re gone.
And the idea that anything could just disappear at any moment is something you suddenly understand in a whole new way. The way I did for a long while after my mother died.
“It’s like I’m not here,” I said to Dr. Nicole, my throat getting thick. “It’s like I disappeared.”
“You’re right here,” she said, taking my hands and squeezing them before holding them up to show me. “You know these hands, right?”
I nodded.
“Here you are,” she said. “You haven’t gone anywhere.” Then she gave me a hug and said, “But let’s not look in the mirror again for a while.”
She wanted to get down to business. She was organizing some tests for me to take on her laptop. While I waited, a random thought occurred to me: Peanut.
“This doesn’t apply to animals, right?” I asked.
“What?” Dr. Nicole asked.
“I’m suddenly worried that when I get home, I won’t be able to see my dog.”
“You’ll definitely be able to see your dog.”
“His face, I mean,” I said. “I need that face. It’s my primary mood-lifter.”
“I understand,” Dr. Nicole said, attention still mostly on her work.
“This face thingy’s only for human faces, right?”
At that, she paused. “Mostly,” she said, “yes.”
“Mostly?” I asked. “What does mostly mean?”
“There’s not a lot of research on animal faces. There has been some research on cars, though.”
“Cars?”
“Some people with this condition have trouble recognizing their cars. They can also have trouble with direction. But it hasn’t been studied enough to understand why or how.”
“So…” Somehow this felt like the worst news of all. “You can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to see my dog’s face?”
But she wasn’t going to let me descend into self-pity. “Guarantees are overrated.”
I must have been spoiling for a fight. “Guarantees are underrated.”
But she didn’t take the bait. “Let’s just take one question at a time.”
* * *
DR. NICOLE HAD queued up some facial recognition tests for me to take to see how bad it was. “This’ll give us a baseline,” she said.
The tests—the Glasgow Face Matching Test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, along with a few others—were all online. She rotated the laptop toward me.
I folded my legs and geared up to begin. I was usually pretty good at tests. But I would not be acing these.
These tests were hard. Like if you made a kindergartner take the SAT.
Some of them asked you to look at two pictures and decide if they were the same person or a different person. Some of them asked you to study a set of faces and then find those people later in groups. Some of them showed you famous people with their hair removed. They specifically did not ask if you could name the person—because recalling names is a different brain system. They asked only if you could recognize them.
Could I recognize them?
I could not.
It was all—and I mean this in the fullest sense of the word—nonsense.
From celebrities to presidents to pop icons to Oscar winners, all the faces in all the tests looked totally indistinguishable. I couldn’t tell the difference between Jennifer Aniston and Meryl Streep. I couldn’t tell Sandra Bullock from Jennifer Lopez. It was like looking at pickup-stick piles of facial features. I could tell that these people had faces. I could see the pieces of the faces. I just couldn’t tell what the faces looked like when you put the pieces together.
That feeling you get when you recognize somebody? That little pop of recognition? I looked at hundreds of faces that day, and I never felt it once.
By the end of the fifth test, I was in tears.
“That’s enough for today, choonks,” Dr. Nicole said, putting her arm around me for a side hug.
“Did you just call me chunks?” I asked. What on earth could that mean?
“Choonks,” she corrected. “It means sweetheart in Trinidad.”
That felt really good for a second. I liked being a sweetheart.
But then I started crying again.
She squeezed my shoulders tighter. “I know it’s a lot.”
“The thing is…” I said, really giving into the crying now. “The thing is … I just don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
“We’re not going to worry about the future,” she said. “We’re going to focus on the here and now. You’re healing great. You’ve taken care of your cerebrovascular issue. You’ve done the hard part.”
She was patting my back now.
My thoughts were churning like a cement mixer. “What if,” I said, voicing my worst fear, “I get stuck like this?”
That’s when Dr. Nicole shifted her position to face me. I looked down at my blanket. “When I hear you say unproductive things,” she said then, “I’m going to call your attention to them and challenge them.”
“Did I say an unproductive thing?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What did I say?”
“Here’s a hypothetical question,” she said next. “If there’s a five percent chance something bad will happen, and a ninety-five percent chance that things will be fine, which one is more likely?”
Was this a trick question? “That things will be fine?”
She nodded. “I want you to work on that.”
“Work on what?”
“On which of your thoughts you’re going to choose to indulge in.”
“Is this about my worrying I’ll get stuck like this?”
She nodded again. “Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”
“You want me not to fixate on the worst-case scenario?”
“I want you to start practicing the art of self-encouragement.”
“So when I catch myself worrying, I should try to convince myself that things are going to be fine?”
“That’s one way to do it.”
“But what if I don’t believe it?”
“Then keep arguing.”
I was supposed to argue myself into feeling optimistic? “I’ve never been great at optimism,” I said.
“That’s what the arguing is for.”
“I’m not very good at arguing, either.”
“Maybe this is a chance to get better.”
But I’d learned long ago that arguing didn’t get you very far. “Can you give me a hint?”
“Try to step back and look at the big picture,” Dr. Nicole said. “That’s where you can see it more clearly.”
“See what?”
“That no matter what happens, you will find a way to be okay—whether your prosopagnosia is temporary or permanent.”
“My proso…” I asked, giving up on the word halfway through. “What’s that?”
“That’s the condition you have right now,” Dr. Nicole said, “based on these test scores.” Then she handed me a diagnosis: “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.”
I waited for those syllables to make sense. But they didn’t.
So she said it again. “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.” Then she added: “Also known as face blindness.”
Five
AND AFTER ALL that, to add massive insult to once-in-a-lifetime injury, who should I run into in the elevator of my building on the very morning I came home?
You guessed it.
The one-night-stand guy. The Weasel.
Fresh back from the hospital, I had walked in slow motion through the lobby of my building, holding my breath as faceless people wandered blithely around me.
I kept my eyes to the carpet, stepped gingerly through the elevator doors, and pressed the button to the top floor—my hair smelling of hospital shampoo and gathered in a careful, stitches-covering ponytail. I was trying with all my might not to accidentally knock that cork in my skull loose while also holding back a tsunami of life-altering realizations about the week I’d just been through … just as the Weasel himself catapulted through the closing doors and tossed his arms up in victory as he cleared them at the last second.
