Where is the Mango Princess? A Journey Back from Brain Injury
Cathy Crimmins
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0375704426
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family.
When her husband Alan is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins' husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality-and the complexities of the heart.
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a little more than a year ago. She has learned to walk again but still drags her right foot. Of course, she was only nineteen when she got hit on the head. They don’t know if Alan, at forty-four, will ever walk again. “Where is the Mango Princess?” Alan has been out of coma for two and a half days, and his speech is gradually sounding less fuzzy. But I don’t understand what he is trying to ask, and no one else is around. “Where is the Mango Princess?” he repeats. I give it a try. “Your nurse?”
word. Sarah continues to talk to him, and I do, too, feeling helpless, marooned in the strangers’ speedboat hovering within a few feet of our battered metal skiff. I keep calling Alan’s name across the space between the boats, telling him I am there. Six or seven other boats are idling in the water all around the scene; later I find out that everyone with a cellular phone aboard has called the police and the ambulance. Someone in a fairly large boat attaches a rope to the skiff and begins to tow
is actually more accurate for children, too, since it refers to a “lie” in which the person is incapable of knowing the truth. Confabulation after brain injury or at the age of three stems from the same developmental problem—as kids, we didn’t always understand what was true and what was not, and neither does the brain injury patient. All of Alan’s confabulations during this phase of his recovery contain a grain of truth, however microscopic. His brain takes little bits and pieces of whatever it
begins to get crummy evaluations. Eventually he either quits in frustration or because of intense fatigue, or he is fired. Case studies of brain-injured people who try to return to work without help chronicle how those workers often lose their jobs years down the road, and by that time no one really attributes it to the brain injury because they think all that was over a long time ago. I explain all this to Alan, but he doesn’t care. I have to go ahead pretty much against his will, and I watch
sad when I pick him up on his last day in the outpatient facility. Dana Trainor and her staff have gotten a cake, and everyone gathers around. His day hospital pals present him with Charles the Brain Child, a little plastic doll with an empty cranium and a brain on a string. The instructions say, “Swing the brainy ball in an upward motion and try to catch it in the hollow of Charles’s head.” Dana kids Alan that he hasn’t really graduated until he can get the plastic brain into the head cup. He
