Music is, in a sense, my first language.  Not that I didn’t talk with words as a youngster - I did – normally and all that.  But when I started playing piano at eight, I found multitudes of communication I had never known before – and I was hooked.  So fast forward to 2021 when I tripped and smashed my face.  Bizarrely, the emergency room, while sending me a dental team to stabilize my teeth, and a plastic surgery team to stitch up my split lip, never mentioned concussion.  Nor did they ask if I’d ever had a concussion before, while I’d had two – one on the ice at seven, one a decade before when a mishap with my dog sent me flying through the air to land on the back of my head. 

Back to 2021.  When I was finally well enough to drag my sorry self to my primary doc, he said, you had what we call a ‘coup contrecoup’.  I knew enough French to know that sounded bad.  He explained: when my face hit the pavement (at a speed my mathematical brain calculated later at between 30 and 40 miles an hour), my brain bounced back and forth against my brain cavity, bruising seriously.  Or as AI puts it: "A coup-contrecoup injury is a traumatic brain injury that occurs when the brain is hit by an object and then rebounds and hits the opposite side of the skull. What happens? Coup: Bruising or tissue damage at the site of impact.  Contrecoup: Damage to brain tissue on the opposite side of the impact."

In other words, I had a traumatic brain injury.  This explained why I was a mental wreck.  Bright lights were painful; loud sounds were intolerable; I had trouble speaking and could no longer spell well (I’d always been a super good speller); my memory was shot; my balance, traditionally excellent, was wonky; I could not read for more than a few moments (yup, big reader).  I feared that I was no longer mentally fit and would never return from there.  (Spoiler alert: it took time, but I did. Although my balance never returned to what It was before and I have some mental impairment; yes, there are lingering effects.  ) 

There is one thing I did during my convalescence.  I played the piano.  My instinct told me that playing might be good for my healing and so I sat at the piano, every day, and I played – Bach, especially, but also other beloved classical composers (Schubert and Beethoven close seconds).  And I COULD play.  I learned once again how playing piano helps to reorder my distressed self. My first language once again saved me.

Music:  Bach C minor partita, take1:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XwIo595ILFTFH9GOM8e6rCg-Mup97swL/view?usp=sharing

Postscript: From the Washington Post, 2/25/25.  “After a traumatic birth left her brain-damaged, author Samina Ali had to rebuild her identity…The doctors had told her she’d be lucky to salvage her short-term memory, lucky to regain fluency of speech, lucky to raise her child as the mother she’d once planned to be. Resuming her career as an author — that was almost certainly out of the question. But Ali no longer trusted what doctors had to say. She had sensed her own mortal peril long before calamity struck, and now her intuition was telling her something else, about how to recover. She would write herself back together…Her neurologist had never seen another patient make a more dramatic recovery. He asked her what she had done to achieve such a remarkable outcome. “I wrote a book,” she told him then. She is still grieving what was lost and still learning what it means to live her life as this version of herself. “People love a finish line,” she says, and smiles again. “There is no finish line.””