My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

by connecting with me, touching me gently and appropriately, making direct eye contact with me, and speaking to me calmly. I responded positively to positive treatment. The professionals who did not connect with me sapped my energy, so I protected myself by ignoring their requests.
    Making the decision to recover was a difficult, complicated, and cognitive choice for me. On the one hand, I loved the bliss of drifting in the current of the eternal flow. Who wouldn't? It was beautiful there. My spirit beamed free, enormous, and peaceful. In the rapture of an engulfing bliss, I had to question what recovery really meant. Clearly, there were some advantages to having a functional left hemisphere. It would allow me the skills of interacting with the external world again. In this state of disability, however, attending to what I perceived as chaos was pure pain, and the effort it would take for me to recover, well, was that my priority?
    Honestly, there were certain aspects of my new existence that I preferred over the way I had been before. I was not willing to compromise my new insights in the name of recovery. I liked knowing I was a fluid. I loved knowing my spirit was at one with the universe and in the flow with everything around me. I found it fascinating to be so tuned in to energy dynamics and body language. But most of all, I loved the feeling of deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.
    I yearned to be in a place where people were calm and valued my experience of inner peace. Because of my heightened empathy, I found that I was overly sensitive to feeling other people's stress. If recovery meant that I had to feel like they felt all the time, I wasn't interested. It was easy for me to separate my "stuff" and emotions from other people's "stuff" and emotions by choosing to observe but not engage. As Marianne Williamson puts it, "Could I rejoin the rat race without becoming a rat again?"
Andrew, another medical student, came by that same morning to give me yet another neurological exam. I was wobbly, incredibly weak, and not capable of sitting up by myself, much less capable of standing up on my feet. But because he was gentle yet firm in his touch, I felt safe with him. He spoke calmly, looked me directly in the eyes, and repeated himself as needed. He was respectful of me as a person - even in this condition. I was confident he would grow up to be a fine doctor. I hope that he has.
Dr. Anne Young, who was, at that time, the chairperson of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurology (I call her the Queen of Neurology), was my neurologist. I had heard about the famous Anne Young for years while working at the Harvard Brain Bank. She served on the Advisory Committee for the Harvard Brain Bank and just two weeks earlier, it was my privilege to sit next to her at an Advisory Counsel luncheon held at the annual Neuroscience Meetings in New Orleans. At the luncheon, I presented the outreach efforts I was engaged in to increase the number of brains donated for research by the psychiatrically-diagnosed population. Dr. Young had met the "professional me" that day, so by the time she found me on her morning roster, we had already established a special rapport.
Among the many circuits in my brain that had gone off-line, it was my good fortune that my circuitry for embarrassment had also gone awry. Very much like a mother duck followed by her long row of ducklings, Dr. Young and her entourage of medical students arrived at my doorway for morning rounds. To my retrospective horror, I was buck-naked with my derriere in the air and in the middle of a sponge bath, when the Queen of Neurology and her party arrived!
    Dr. Young's eyes were soft and kind, and she smiled as she looked me straight in the eye. When she approached, she immediately reached for my foot - much like a good horse handler will touch a horse on their backside as they pass behind it. Dr. Young helped me into a comfortable position. She then