From Scientist to Stroke Survivor : Life Redacted - an excerpt

Part I: Overture

Her first experience was a penetrating itch.
This sensation was layered on top of blistering
pain shooting from her right head into her eye.
It was not the kind of feeling diminished by
vigorous scratching, as is the case following a
bug bite. Hers was a jaw-clenching urgency to
dig her nails deeply into the right side of her
scalp and face. She felt ignited, as if a vial of
lightning was injected intravenously. It was
all-consuming and unshakable, despite her
clawing. Agony raged through her. The 1-10
subjective scale that doctors instructed her to
rate pain stemming from her connective tissue
disease recalibrated itself. Nothing could
compete with this uproar.

  That is, until the girl reckoned with her
totalizing unanchoring. Suddenly, she failed
to locate her entire right side. The once
watertight GPS system between her brain and
her body was breached. “Mom, is my right
side on the bed? Where is my right side? Can
you see it? Is it there?” Her interrogatories
gushed forth, the questions colliding into each
other breathlessly as her terror mounted. Her
throat constricted around syllables. Her body
plan felt remapped to an uncharted terrain
relative to before. This was the after—the
other side of wherever she had been, an
elsewhere perpendicular to everything that
framed her frameworks of time, space, herself
and truth—she would not, could not, ever
forget. It jolted her like a harrowing
nightmare, a plot twist crafted in a science
fiction workshop. 

That is how traumatic cataclysms strike—in a slice of a second. The world you assumed was a fixture turns out to be a balloon puncturable by a sharp blade. Paradoxically, the nervous system absorbs loss almost as gradually as it heals from an onslaught— gruelingly and ploddingly. 

  The sliver of a blessing inherent in this type
of tragedy is the utter uncertainty, the absence
of medical prognosis as to what may unfold in
subsequent months and years. Sometimes, the
unknown is what rescues. She is disoriented
in her body. Everything the girl learned in
Harvard’s Evolutionary Biology lecture halls
capsized internally. She felt herself in a state
of decay, as if she was a radioactive isotope
leaking out of the lattice that held her
universe up. Just as quickly as we enter the
womb of the world, we can be pushed out,
evaporated out of our current mentality and
woken to hollow shells of ourselves.

She could not determine where her right side
ended, and the world began. Her sense of
boundary dissolved. Her spine morphed from
midline into a period, a hard stop, followed by
a landslide of empty space. Her sense of
center was catapulted to off-kilter. It still is.
She lived out of context, at a remove from
reference, inside the split-screen of her body.
Her now overwrought and confused nervous
system articulated a frightening fact. She
forgot the geography of her right side, the
drifting continents of ribs and limbs that were
once paradoxically, disconcertingly, and
lullingly welded to her torso. She could see it
out of the periphery of her left eye. But
feeling and seeing were so detached in her
now. She longed to feel her right limbs
against the gurney.  She missed her once
impervious right outline and felt like a vessel
spilling out of herself, drop by drop, to the
right. 

  Fear overtook her, gripping her in a
chokehold, its sour taste festering on her
tongue. Her mother stood beside her bearing
witness, a mirror of dense horror. Despair
pooling in both of their eyes. Silence
enveloped them inside an igloo of
trauma. Their mutual passion for language
gave way to a stale quiet, an unfamiliar
medium for both.  They stared into the
black abyss of immobilized space
endeavoring to divine something ineffable in
air.

  Medical mishaps were part and parcel of what
it meant to live in the girl’s “before” body.
Since age eight, hypermobility endowed her
joints with too many degrees of freedom. She
was always a step away from a kneecap or an
arm dislocating. But the incidents she
overcame with physical therapy were
transitory. They did not etch themselves onto the pedestal of who she was and never
jeopardized her potential. Now, for the first
time, future and hope forsook her. An exotic
vernacular of subtext—the semiotics of
grimaces, winces, gasps and glazed eyes—
replaced vocabulary, too frictionless and blunt
to express her baleful umbrage, her
immanence in silence that left her mute. She
felt unexpectedly atomized, cleared out of
herself, by a tsunami.

She firmly shut and opened her eyelids while
whispering prayers to a Judaic God she
abandoned decades ago when her genetic
connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos
Syndrome (EDS), set in. In vain, she hoped
that she was still in a daze from a cocktail
of ketamine and propofol, that reality would
kick in and the bilateral symmetry of the body
she possessed prior to the doctor’s near-fatal
blunder would be restored. But there was no
exit. There was no backpedaling into the
person she was only three hours before.
The physician who performed the procedure
swiftly emerged by her bedside. He looked
too debonair in his bespoke suit and necktie,
as though he were ready for a party or a date
in the direct aftermath of what would be his
greatest medical malfeasance. Did he know?
Did she? 

  As he neared her, her inflection entered the
highest register it does when her panic surges.
“I can’t feel anything on my right side. I can’t
move my right side. What’s going on?” The
words tumbled out of her. She did not have
time for niceties. “Some of the local
anesthetic probably tracked down your right
side,” he answered curtly. His tone was
implacable. “You are fine and can go home,”
he advised as he ducked his head to look at an
incoming text message. Much like his advent,
he hurriedly departed the building, leaving
the baffled girl and her mother in      nurses’
hands. 

If you are wondering why she refers to herself in the third person, why this girl remains anonymous, it is because she no longer is— that person forever arrested in the ember, of Elly’s, of my before. She glares at old photos of herself with accosting disgust. She simultaneously recognizes herself and does not. Her past could have been lifted off novel pages. My past.

I muddle and contuse pronouns over and
again throughout this narrative, as I grapple
with the lack of distance between me and
myself. I write through and into an experience
so massive that I require techniques to
capture it. Poetry, in its permutations and
repetition, is the one steadfast technology I
leverage for this undertaking. I am not
concerned with making meaning but with
coming as close as possible to it. Therefore,
the source of this artwork is a hovering
presence; trauma’s scale is a forest, while my
ritual consists of drawing a single tree, a
branch even, in lines of words that have
proven to be essential lifelines. I glue myself
together by taking a step back from the ‘I,’
not to bypass it but to earn my right ultimately
to occupy it again.

She turned her back on her before, removing
the Harvard degree that feels like a
mockery from her wall. She fumes with ire at
the brutal contrast between these two
renditions of herself and wants to yell, to
punch something, anything. She feels the
sediment of this ghostly afterlife aggregating
over her fossilizing self. Where did that girl
participating in impassioned class discussions
go? Recollections flood her. She feels like she
is being waterboarded as trauma uncurls
itself, its weeping wound reopening anew.
But she will soon realize that forgetting is a
more devastating anguish, a clamping down
around the nebulous clouds of what
peters out of awareness. 

No one warns you of the swift clip of tragedy,
how you can blink and the tectonic plates of
your universe rupture, swallowing you, dust
particles discreetly falling out of the known
world. She feels discombobulated and
claustrophobic in  the body she now shares
with trauma. It feels too cramped for both of
them. Her thoughts amass a surreal heft, a
crushing gravity that threatens to break
something in the brain that once made
sense of everything. She has to set them
down. Regenerative medicine was previously
a wonder cure for her body, miraculously
healing torn tendons and unstable joints from
head to toe. Her succession of past successes
with these interventions with the same doctor
mollified any qualms about what should have
been routine cervical injections, lending them
the ease of stitches, or even of band-aid,
removal. 

We naturally other the infirmity we see in the world. We glance over and around wheelchair-bound individuals, aliments of the elderly, the blind reliant on walking sticks, limbs casted and dependent on crutches and stroke survivors wearing distorted masks. A multitude of mental and physical disabilities are not even appraised by eyes curtly scanning, by minds concretizing a single thought into a myopic impression, because—like my connective tissue disease minus my stroke—these invisible impairments bluster below skin and, therefore, are undermined, undervalued and misapprehended. They are plagues, we convince ourselves, that cannot intercede in the zip code of our being, certainly outside the paved paradise of age 27. But no one is immune to inevitability; it can besiege anyone at any moment, irrespective of age. We are all closer than we can countenance losing our ways and our bodies.

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician's needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).