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I'm not a brain injury survivor.  Well, at least not having been diagnosed with one. As I started to ponder this and let my thoughts wander, I recalled the recent scare from my best friend from high school, who became a celebrated pilot for a major airline. One Sunday morning, I woke up to his wife's text that he had a massive cerebral hemorrhage overnight and was in ICU. We did not know if he would make it. I cried my eyes out as he was always one of the most vibrant, funny, present friends I have known since high school. His wife began a text group in her exhausting task of keeping everything together after having just moved which is the second highest stress next to death. Now she had to face her husband's mortality. This text group became a prayer group as we each expressed our support and prayers for both of them for my friend's recovery which he miraculously made after being one of less than 20% who walk out of the hospital after such a massive brain bleed. Today just a few months later, I am so thankful my friend sounds as he always did, goes for long walks often and is even back to driving. Maybe his hobby of Lego collecting and building was a helpful form of therapy we call play therapy with children but might be as important for adults.

 

Having spent three years in the Daylesford Abbey in Pennsylvania, I prayed, meditated and pondered over miracles and found research supporting the benefits of prayer for those who are ill even if prayer does not always cure them. People who are prayed for do better than those who are not. As a therapist I cannot help but think there is a communal aspect of knowing people are praying for you which is to say they are sending you one the highest form of energy, support and connection besides being there.

 

As a child growing up in the inner city of South Philadelphia, I came upon a little paperback in our neighborhood library. It was called the Power of Prayer on Plants. I renewed this little book over and over for years. Having been a plant collector and grower with my best friend on the block even before high school and going to Catholic school, the two came together in an old Barbara Streisand movie - On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) in which Barbara plays a college student with ESP who has special powers to make plants grow quickly and is undergoing hypnosis for reincarnation...And only now do I see it was filmed in one of my favorite places on Earth - the Royal Pavilion in Brighton built in its magnificent Indian-style architecture George IV loved and built for his mistress. I call it one of my favorite places because one of my favorite people I used to live with here and love, lives there now.

 

A year after my mother died three years ago this month, my brother suffered several small strokes. The ensuring evaluations and tests revealed he also has an aneursym that his doctor believed was genetic and recommended his daughters and I get tested for. My doctor approved of the test but United Healthcare denied my doctor's request because I did not have enough symptoms. Healthcare I was told does not cover prevention. To me that is the worst form of healthcare and a reactive costly one because of their neglect.

 

Now, I cannot do my morning inversions on my inversion stool, especially because I live alone, without thinking, what if I blow a gasket under the hood. Maybe I am using auto mechanic terminology partly in gest and partly because my father fixed our cars along with everything else in the house we grew up in where I work on this piece.

 

It is a reminder to me that what this eZine is dedicated to can happen to anyone. Having almost died from such a severe case of the Mumps when I was just three years old, then having had illnesses often, my father often referred to me as the sickly one. I became quite the hypochondriac reading the Readers Digest Medical Guide in bed as a sick child sometimes convinced I had everything I read....Then as people started getting many of the illnesses I read about I started to want to be a veterinarian because I thought people had enough doctors to take care of them and the poor animals did not. That desire did not last very long after high school when I found it was not for me and God came along with a vocation to the abbey. After three years, I left, wandered a few different jobs only to end up back in Philadelphia then New York to pursue a career as a psychoanalyst.

 

After my friend's brain bleed and seeing other friends and family pass since the pandemic, I cannot help but wonder about survivor's guilt and vicarious traumatization in those of us who are close to the victims of such events. My mother often said, "Patience, patience..." So did her mother in Italian as an immigrant. Patience was their mantra.... And Patience is what has brought me into my profession and understanding of how to cope with those who struggle to process what many take for granted.

 

Some years ago after reflecting on accidents children and some friends suffered and even my own, I thought no one should leave home without a helmet and sidewalks should be made of rubber like some running tracks and playgrounds. I once was sitting in the kitchen of best friend's house I grew up down the street from. I did what we were always told not to do pushing back on the back two legs of the chair. It slipped too far back and I fell backwards hitting the back of my head on the iron radiator. Years later, we would learn how traumatic brain injuries and depression can result from football players and other traumas to the head many of us suffer growing up from banging our heads in so many ways....

 

While writing this piece, I discovered a new sitcom on Netflix called AP BIO in which a defunct college philosophy professor takes a job as a high school teacher quite begrudgingly. In a conversation with another teacher held on suspension for misconduct, he said "And what is a friend, but a single soul dwelling in two bodies," an idea credited to Aristotle. If this is true then we may be more connected than separate. But how many friends can anyone share such a profound connection with? Maybe that's both the challenge and the fear of connection in feeling someone else's pain.