Wyzga On Words

A March In Manhattan & A Trek Across The Gobi Desert: What Do They Have In Common?

I'm a big believer in "timing & location" being applicable to more situations than real estate.  Helen Thayer has been pulling off explorer-naturalist excursions for decades and only a few weeks ago did I hear her name. She was being interviewed on NPR prior to a speaking engagement in San Diego.  What caught my ear was her plans for an upcoming trek with her husband, Bill: 1500 miles across India to study the culture.  Never mind that Bill is 82 and Helen is 71. She was 63 and he was 74 when they walked across the Gobi Desert: 1,600 miles in 80 days with temperatures often topping 110 degrees.

"Walking the Gobi" is part thriller, part adventure story, part feat of endurance.  And a very early call about the disastrous effects of climate chaos/global warming. Remember that Thayer walked in 2001.  She published her book in 2007. Back when she and Bill were making their way west to east across a forbidding landscape, Mongolian nomads who make their homes here, raise their children, raise herds and flocks of sheep and goats, had been telling her there had been no rain in three years.  Mongolians date to at least Genghis Kahn.  These people are desert nomads. They know the climate of their home.

You might wonder why a desert needs rain.  Green things grow in the desert.  Animals adapted to this ferocious life find sources of water and forage.  As do people.  When there is no rain and winds kick up to 50, 60 , 70 more miles per hour, huge sandstorms fill the sky and carry beyond borders.  The natural equilibrium of the desert is thrown off balance and everyone suffers.

Believing that grass roots efforts are what really get things done, thousands of men and women and children met up in Manhattan on Sunday to march for correcting climate chaos.  As reported in the NYTimes, Taking a Call for Climate Change to the Streets, legions of marchers with no more affiliation than this one shared planet demonstrated that the time had come for ordinary people to turn things around. Marches were also held all over the world as ordinary people on every continent realized that the heating up of Planet Earth is not some joke of the scientific community.

I am gearing up for a pre-trial legal research, otherwise known as a focus group.  As one of a series of political compass questions I am posting to the potential participants, there is this one: "Is climate chaos/global warming some error of science or a real disaster in the making?"  To my astonishment, well over half of those being recruited in SoCal call it a scientific error. Here in California we are looking at Year 3 of a record drought. At a time when other folks are getting ready to don wool socks and prepare soup for dinner, we are reeling from weeks of triple digit temperatures. As reported in the NYTimes:

Last week, meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that this summer — the months of June, July and August — was the hottest on record for the globe, and that 2014 was on track to break the record for the hottest year, set in 2010.

It was concern about the consequences of that warming that drew people to the march, organized by a dozen environmental, labor and social justice groups, and that inspired some of the event’s most sober and most outrageous expressions, some of them not even on the route.

Whether you are two elderly foreigners leading camels across the Gobi or one of many marching in Manhattan or your corner of the globe, the message is still the same: this is real - do what you can with what you have.  There is no Plan-et B.  

 

What's Really In That Plastic Bottle Of Bottled Water You're Drinking?

There's nothing odd about 3 corporations taking control of our drinking water.  It's just business.

Nestle, Coke and Pepsi have their eye on the future.  The future is water: who has it, who controls it, who needs it.

Mahatma Ghandi said, "There is enough water for human need, but not for human greed."

This is where we have arrived: corporate greed.

Yet, it's not all their fault.  Corporations sell what we buy.  When we stop buying we change things.

Water covers 75% of planet Earth; only 1% of that is drinkable.  In the next 15 years almost two-thirds of the human race will be struggling for clean drinking water.

Water is the new oil.

Now does it make sense?

Nestle, Coke and Pepsi are sucking the earth dry, bottling the water and selling it back to you at 1900 times the original cost to them.

What do you think goes into a bottle of Arrowhead, Ozark, Dasani or Aquafina water?  Pure mountain stream refreshment?

Over 40% of the bottled water on the shelves is merely good old-fashioned municipal tap water.

Recall a few years back when Atlanta was suffering the drought?  Lakes were down to dirt?  But the local Coke plant kept on bottling?

The joke's on us.

Compounding the problem is the petrochemicals that make up the plastic bottles that hold the water.  These cancer-causing petrochemicals leach out into the water you drink, you give your kids to drink.

And it doesn't stop there.  Not everyone gets curbside recycling service.  And even if we did there are not enough recycling plants or uses for the bottles.  So they end up in landfills where the petrochemicals leach into the soils and ground water.

And it doesn't end there.  Our oceans are becoming a toxic plastic stew as more and more bottles are swept into the lakes, rivers, streams and sea.  Marine life eats the broken down plastic pellets.

Here's a few sources you can check out to begin your research and then decide for yourself if it's time to give up the bottle:

Tapped - the movie. This 2009 Indie Winner examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. The high cost -- to both the environment and our health -- of bottled water is the subject of this documentary that enlists activists, environmentalists, community leaders and others to expose the dark side of the bottled water industry. Americans may rethink their obsession with bottled H20 when they learn of the unregulated industry's willingness to ignore environmental and health concerns, and the problems that arise as a result.  Produced by Atlas Films.  Trailer.

We made it easy for you: click here to watch Tapped, all 75 minutes of it.

Just to balance the argument a bit, here are Top 10 Reasons why bottled water is a blessing.  And from a Quaker.

Grading your bottled water.    

Does Depression Have A Function?

It's no secret, there is depression among us.

Asking the question, "How many Americans suffer from depression?" pulls up a plethora of information, articles, research and studies.

It appears that many of us experience a wide range of responses from the blues to severe clinical depression.

A University of Virginia psychiatrist who has been treating patients with depressive disorders for over thirty years believes that depression is an evolutionary paradox.  Sierra Bellows reporting in "The Evolution of Depression" tells us more about Dr. Andy Thomson and his unorthodox ideas.  Excerpt.

"Since the dawn of the species about 200,000 years ago, humans have evolved in response to the environments in which they’ve found themselves. In Northern Europe, lighter skin helped early inhabitants get enough vitamin D during the dark winters. In places in Africa plagued by malaria, many people have a genetic mutation that makes them immune. Like all living things since the first protozoa, the human body has been shaped by natural selection. And evolutionary psychology suggests that the mind has as well. Evolutionary psychologists look for the advantages of different behaviors and mental traits that might cause them to spread through the population.

For more than 30 years, U.Va. psychiatrist Dr. Andy Thomson (Med ’74) has been treating patients, and most often he treats them for depression. Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, and each year clinical depression affects more than 17 million Americans.

Thomson and his collaborator Paul Andrews, now at McMaster University in Canada, believe that depression is an evolutionary paradox. If it didn’t confer any advantages, it should have been selected against and occur only rarely in the population. What kind of evolutionary advantage might depression have?

“Depression, psychic pain, alerts you to the fact that you have a problem, stops business as usual, focuses your attention,and can provide a signaling function that you need help,” says Thomson. “Basically, it forces you to think. Now with all its stressors and the myriad ways of evading them, modern life doesn’t encourage you to think deeply. But thinking deeply works. It’s doing what the mind was made to do.”

Not everyone agrees with the theory.  Some take issue with the premise that depression helps in problem-solving and other executive functions.  Perhaps, as is suggested, we need to reconsider how we define "depression" and not lump everything from "feeling blue" to suffering from chronic suicidal ideations in the same basket. 

You may wish to read on to gauge the full range of professional disagreements and decide for yourself: What use is depression?

Here's my experience: I have learned when enough is enough and I have to step back from the rigors of the world.  I call it time out in the natural world or sitting on the curb to look and listen while the parade marches by.  I have expanded my capacity for empathy, understanding and compassion in the face of enormous daily global suffering encountered in the work I do.  I have developed resilience born of experience.  My mantra is, "Fall down 7 - get up 8."

Maybe the key is this: how we play the hand we are dealt to find something life-affirming in the grimness of a disease, condition or situation we did not ask for.  Here's an example of one man's return After Disaster Strikes.

Narrative Medicine And The Cross-Over To Law School And Law Practice.

What do internists, especially ones practicing narrative medicine, have to tell law students and lawyers? Quite a lot.  And all it will take is 39 minutes of your time.

Rita Charon, MD, PhD. a nationally renown physician, writer and educator as well as Executive Director/Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University is at the top of the game of Narrative Medicine.

Click here to attend the Department of Medicine Division of Medical Humanities presentation "Narrative Medicine: Accuracy, Evidence, Allegiance, Joy" as Dr. Charon discusses the importance of the medical narrative as a tool for physicians to better understand their patients and themselves, and it's role in training a new generation of doctors.

What is so fascinating to this former pediatric nurse, life-long storyteller and litigation consultant is the cross-over between Dr. Charon's ideas on the dividends of narrative medicine and those that can be reaped in law schools and law practices.

Highlights with my comments in [brackets]:

*    Medicine must go beyond the bounds of knowledge with differential diagnostic brains.  That kind of fact-based thinking is inadequate to the task.  [Likewise, our reliance on "the facts and only the facts" gives us a distorted view of what happened to our clients and what matters to them.]

*    Illness unfolds in stories.  The thing that is amiss in the body tells the self that there is something the matter and eventually that story comes to the attention of the healthcare provider who will turn around and tell it to a colleague.  The idea being that the telling and retelling should lead one to know what to do.  [How do you see yourself in the internist's shoes?]

*    Medical stories are a matter of ongoingness.  A doctor's duty is to develop a sense of story that takes into account devastation, loss, grief, magnitude of hurt and pain.  [Our clients are in the same boat - and we are there with them.]

*    The big question: Are you available to receive the story, to “co-hear” the narratives of illness, to train yourself to know accurately and fully what the patient expresses to be more effective in care?  [For lawyers, are we available to hold the space for the client so we develop different skills interviewing our clients, determining what the problem is and how to remedy it?]

*    You must learn to heed the story, learn from the story, learn the skills to recognize it, stand in the gathering of the story and work with the patient and family - to experience what the patient and family go through and for the patient to learn what the healthcare people experience.  [Who here has often desired that ability to co-hear with our clients and our clients families?  We are walking parallel roads with these internists.]

*    What are the dividends?  We find this practice helps improve cohesion of healthcare teams, minimize burn-out, increase empathy, encourage taking on the perspective of another person, feeling a growth in affiliation with their colleagues and others, listening attentively and less defensively, recognizing the unique dimensions of colleagues, using parts of the brain that had gone fallow, and recognizing that stories are total storms rather than the typical pattern of beginning, middle and end.  [What would you give for similar practical and human dividends in your practice?]

*    Narrative medicine helps medical students and doctors stop squandering evidence by learning to retrieve it in narrative, grasping the patent's story in words and learning to plumb the meaning of the evidence.  [For lawyers that meaning will carry over to the trier of fact.]

*    When doctors are fortified with the competencies of listening, curiosity, empathy, imagination their practice changes, they make authentic contact with the patient cleared of biases and other fsact-gathering screens.  [All anyone wants is to be heard, even for a moment.  After you have given the client the chance t tell their story you can go back and collect the data you need for the lawsuit.] 

Dr. Charon's makes this introduction to every patient: " As your doctor I face you so you can express to me what you are going through in words - please tell me what you think I should know about your situation."  She sits with her hands in her lap and absorbs what happens.  By inviting the account she can learn without shoe-horning the patient into her own fact list.  [Beginning with law school we can encourage the development of attentive listening. It wil flow over to practice.  Imagine th transformations.]

I invite you to spend 39 minutes and change your practice with practical and human dividends.
                                   
















                          

The Sounds Of Silence Mean More To Us Than We Know.

It's been a dog's age since I've gone cross country skiing in a snowy woods. The silence was so profound you could hear a snowflake fall and meet up with another. Even now I can summon the peace and tranquility of that memory in my mind.  It takes effort to separate myself from the hum of civilization.

More and more we are assaulted by noise.  We may think we are doing a good job of blocking it out or coping or managing.  But the truth of it is we may not really appreciate what good the sounds of silence do for our souls; especially those found in nature.

I am encouraged by the work of folks like Davyd Betchkal, Denali Par and National Preserve's physical-science technician as he locates and captures "nature's soft voice before human sounds completely drown it out."  Kim Tingley reporting for the NYTimes trekked along with Betchkal and has a remarkable story to tell in "Whisper of The Wild."

What compositions would nature play without us?  Excerpt.

"An undeveloped swath of land nearly the size of Vermont, Denali should be a haven for natural sound. Enormous stretches of wild country abut the park in every direction save east, where Route 3 connects Fairbanks to Anchorage. One dead-end and mostly unpaved road penetrates the park itself. Yet since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month’s worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park — including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley — Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props — the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes. The loudest stretch of the year is summer, when hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to Denali, embarking on helicopter or fixed-wing rides. Snowmobiles are popular with locals, and noise from the highway, the park road and daily passenger trains can travel for miles. That sort of human din, studies are beginning to suggest, is imperiling habitat — in Denali as well as wilderness areas around the world — as surely as a bulldozer or oil spill. But scientists have so little information about what landscapes should sound like without human interference that trying to correct the problem would be like a surgeon’s wielding a scalpel without knowing the parts of the body, let alone his patient’s symptoms. To restore ecosystems to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us." 

More importantly, human chatter is severing the link with nature.  Everything is connected to everything else. Excerpt.

"Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.” [Emphasis added.]

Who could ever have imagined that soundscapes are worthy of protection - or would need to be?  But that's what it's come to.  Excerpt.

"Only recently, however, have governments from Japan to the European Union begun to recognize natural sounds as a resource requiring protection. When Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916, it was to “conserve the scenery”; not until 2000 did a Park Service director issue systemwide instructions for addressing “soundscape preservation.” In 1986, a midair plane crash above the Grand Canyon National Park — where sightseeing tours had operated virtually unchecked for almost 70 years — prompted Congress to pass the National Parks Overflights Act, requiring the Park Service to work with the Federal Aviation Administration in remedying the “significant adverse effect on the natural quiet” that aircraft there appeared to be having. The act also called for studying the impacts of overflight noise on other parks.

Initial research returned alarming results. In Yosemite, planes were heard 30 to 60 percent of the day. In the Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, 8 to 10 helicopters passed overhead per hour. What’s more, other experiments showed, much as the M.I.T. study did, that noise affected the way visitors saw landscapes: when volunteers viewed photos of natural vistas while listening to helicopters on tape, they rated the scenes less picturesque than they did under quieter conditions. By 2000, the National Park Service had staffed a division to gather data on park soundscapes nationwide and create, with the F.A.A., air-tour management plans at 100-plus locations. More than a decade since — partly because of disagreements between aviation and conservation interests — no such plan is in place, though many parks have begun looking for ways to trim other noise, turning off idling shuttle buses, curbing car traffic and investing in less uproarious maintenance tools. Grand Canyon managers, after nearly 25 years of laboring, last year proposed amendments to the timing and routes of sightseeing flights that would make the park somewhat more serene."

Who lives and who dies can be a matter of who is the loudest.  Excerpt.

"Species can fight for airtime in a limited bandwidth by changing their volume or frequency, or by rescheduling the timing of their calls. But there’s no way animals can alter their ability to listen — for their very survival — if human noise conceals, for example, the twig-snap of a prowler or the skittering of prey. In the United States, where more than 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road, the listening area available to most creatures is rapidly shrinking. Beyond hunting and hiding, even invertebrates use the gabbing of unwitting cohabitants for navigation. Sightless, earless and adrift in the open ocean, coral larvae seek to settle on tropical reefs by swimming toward the throbs of muttering fish and snapping-shrimp claws. Eurasian reed warblers en route to southern Africa at night flutter blind over pine forests, sand dunes and the Baltic Sea until, hundreds of feet below, the cheeping of other warblers signals the presence of sustaining wetlands. If those aural cues disappear, the species that heed them may be floating and flying without a compass." 

I was asked recently, "What can we do to help the honeybee situation?"  I replied, "A hive in every backyard is one grass roots approach that's quick, cheap, easy and is working."

For just a moment, stand in the quietest place you can find and listen.  Maybe all you will hear is the beating of your own heart.  That's critical.  Because if we fail to stop killing the planet, what's the point of anything we are working on, right now?

 

 

Glamorous Movie Star + Weapons Systems + Cultural Story Themes Of Bias Against The Beautiful.

My father used to wax nostalgic about the glamorous Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr.  And no wonder!

Who knew that behind all the glamour was a brain?  And imagination? 

When Lamarr put those skills to work she invented and patented weapons systems that were a precursor to today's "smart bombs" as well as technology for cell phones, the Bluetooth and GPS. 

Could she sell it?  Not a chance.  The problem was that the men in charge could not be persuaded beyond her beauty.  And Lamarr assumed that the men in charge would overlook her looks and bank on her brains. 

Bias against the beautiful.  Then as now you have to prove yourself twice as much.

Lamarr got nowhere until at the age of 82 when she was awarded the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Click here to read John Adams' review of Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World in his NYTimes Book Review article, "Brainy Beauty."

Here's the best part that resonates with this storyteller:

"Behind the uniqueness of this story lie deeper themes that Rhodes touches upon: the gender biases against beautiful and intelligent women, the delicate interpersonal politics of scientific collaboration and, perhaps most important of all, the never-ending, implacable conflict between art and Mammon in American culture."

Bias against the beautiful.  Then as now you have to prove yourself twice as much.

Software That Listens For Lies Reminds Us To Keep An Ear Tuned In Focus Group Research.

Imagine this: computers are being taught to spot patterns of emotional speech - human speech that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.

How far we've come from "Hal."

Anne Eisenberg writing for the NYTimes, "Software That Listens For Lies," takes us to a world of promising detective research: computer linguistics.  Excerpt.

"That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie.

Dr. Hirschberg is not the only researcher using algorithms to trawl our utterances for evidence of our inner lives. A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation."

While it is unlikely that the research or the software will be used in courts of law, the goal is to plumb the depths of human speech for the clues it gives in analyzing speech.

“The scientific goal is to understand how our emotions are reflected in our speech,” Dr. Jurafsky said. “The engineering goal is to build better systems that understand these emotions.”

The programs that these researchers are developing aren’t likely to be used as evidence in a court of law. After all, even the use of polygraphs is highly contentious. But the new programs are already doing better than people at some kinds of mind-reading."

Admittedly, the computers are still struggling with the finer signs of emotion - a not too different situation from us homo narrans.  Yet, what we do have that the computers lack is access to facial expression, body language, and experience to help us discover meaning in language.

TIP:    One place litigators can practice focused listening is in focus group research.  Stop all else and listen to what is being said about the legal stories you are telling the members of the community.

TIP:    Pay attention to three things: (1) the facts the participants use to discuss the legal stories, (2) the emotion they use to express their thoughts, and (3) the intention behind the words.  You might hear energy, boredom, fatigue, doubt, confusion, or enthusiasm.  The way words are spoken informs the attorney about underlying messages.

TIP:    Take careful note of the analogies the participants use to bring their life experiences and world views closer to (or further away) from your client's. 

TIP:    If they are not finding the universal story in your client's particular life experience that is a most important clue to inform you how you could lose this case. 

TIP:    Rework the legal story from a place of "How can we lose?" based on what you heard them say to more closely align the legal proof of your story with this "community proof" necessary to persuade the decision-maker.

 

Playing This Weekend In Napa, CA: Medical-Legal Conference On TBI.

The Brain Injury Association of California is hosting its annual Neuroscience of Brain Injury Conference November 4th and 5th at the Silverado Resort in Napa, CA.

The Conference Program--2011 is enticing.  We intend to come together to do good work.  Hope to see you there.

A Must Read About Traumatic Brain Injury & The Issue That Besets Litigators.

An issue that besets and bedevils personal injury litigators representing the harms and losses suffered by a client with traumatic brain injury (TBI) is how to tell the story of those harms and losses.  TBI damages are often "hidden in plain view" leaving the decision-maker less inclined to comprehend and believe the depth and breadth of the injuries.  Far easier to see third degree burns.  It's a real work of art and science to expose the damages for what they are. 

Jane Rosett eloquently writing her own story for the NYTimes, "Starting Again After a Brain Injury," relates the remarkable fight for her life beginning with what goes wrong with the brain when it is slammed in a traumatic event - and what can happen to rebuild, albeit not replace, what was lost. Excerpt.

“WANT a piece of gum, Jane?” asked my friend Andrée.

“What?” I asked her.

“Gum!”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“It’s Trident.”

It was delicious.

That evening, I told my friend David about my day’s big discovery. “It’s called gum and you chew it and it’s fun and there’s this one kind that will let me blow bubbles!”

“Yes, it’s called bubble gum, Jane,” he told me, patiently."

Here I am struggling to function with a newly acquired Logitech WAVE keyboard after decades of using the Microsoft ergonomic one in the misplaced hope that it would stave off carpal tunnel.  I remind myself that it's a simple matter of relearning where to place my fingers with confidence and dexterity.  And it frustrates me.

With TBI how does one "rethread" the lines of one's life?  What does it take?  59 months ago Rosett was jolted at the age of 45 into a new existence.  26 months of rigorous work allowed her back into the home where she had lived independently for 17 years.

Ironically, who she was, her activism for AIDS organizations, and the diverse interests she had engaged in previously created a perverse dress rehearsal for dealing with the challenges of her life today.  How does the past reassert itself?  One vehicle is neuroplasticity.  Excerpt.

"I once believed that I could not grieve for what I do not remember. I no longer believe that. I do grieve for what I can no longer connect with. Phantom memories. “Your pies!” “Your bread!” Friends tell me they miss my baking. One woman whom I still don’t recognize told me I used to shred beets into my chocolate cake batter. Her comment reintroduced me to an evaporated passion I no longer remembered and had not missed until then.

More than four and a half years post brain damage, memories still do not serenely knit back together as in those nifty “How the Brain Heals” neurology cartoons. Shards of memories pierce my consciousness before fragmenting and melting into fresh half-syllables. Some memories hover in shadows. Others gouge and flee.

Initially, memories came back in my dreams and later through my writing and photography. It’s the images, not the words, that come back to me.

My friend Andrée, a physician who treats patients with traumatic brain injuries (though she isn’t one of my doctors), offers me the clinical word for what I am describing: diaschisis, sometimes said to be Greek for “shocked throughout.” She explains that neuroplasticity lets me bypass damaged parts of my brain and forge new neuronal communication routes so I can access, or remember, sensory information that I received as a word, from another place from within my brain and in an entirely different format. Like an image. “So for example, if your brain receives the word ‘love,’ it can recall the word ‘love’ as an image of a heart,” Andrée explains.

Thank you, neuroplasticity!"

Rosett closes with a plea for all of us temporarily able-bodied folks to heed:

"If you want to connect with someone who has a traumatic brain injury, hire us, include us in conversations that regard us instead of speaking about us in the third person in front of our faces. And instead of pressing us about what we “must” remember from our past, simply be present with us. People with traumatic brain injuries are often scolded for having “no sense of time,” but the present is, for many of us, our only authentic time.

So when you see us, please don’t be offended if we don’t remember weathering earthquakes with you, baking your birthday cakes or bouncing your babies on our knees. We’re struggling to make sense of a world that seems brand-new — sometimes wonderful, often overwhelming — with all the courage we can muster."

When Doctors Become Patients & Lawyers Become Clients, Who Calls The Game Shot?

Eric D. Manheime is the director of Bellevue Hospital Center.  He is also a physician.  And the survivor of throat cancer. Writing for the NYTimes, "When Doctors Become Patients," he reveals that when it comes to serious and profound illness affecting them, "doctors are as irrational" as the rest of us; and probably more so given what they know intellectually. 

Dr. Manheim recounts the ups and downs of being diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the throat, brutal treatment regimens, the removedness of physicians from the real world of their patients, the peaceful resignation of choosing not to go on, and the intervention of his spouse who told him he would complete the treatment.  It's a rigorous read.

In Dr. Manheim's story he is a better doctor for having been a patient.  Once he let himself be the patient.  Still and all he will tell you that even if he had to do it all over again, he would not be any more prepared.  "No amount of doctoring can prepare you for being a patient."

What happens back in the Land of Jurisprudence when a lawyer becomes a client?  Do you make it any easier for those who are on your side, fighting your case?  Or are you still in charge? 

In Manheim's situation his wife made the crucial decision for him to finish the treatment.  As a result he is three years now a survivor of the cancer.  He recognizes the dilemma of who will make the right decision when the physicians and the patient can not.

A law suit may be equivalent to a case of cancer.  I am forced to wonder how much control the lawyer has clenched in her fist because she has seen the bad outcomes when she was sitting on the other side of the desk.  Will she allow herself to be a client?  How will she let another advocate on her behalf?

In situations like these, Counsel, those of us working on your behalf may disagree and differ with your assessment, legal story and strategy.  Who is there to help call the game shot?