Where Is the Mango Princess?: A Journey Back From Brain Injury [Paperback]

"Alan's brain got run over by a speedboat," Cathy Crimmins writes. "That last sentence reads like a bad country-western song lyric, but it's true. It was a silly, horrible, stupid accident." And so begins the harrowing tale of a family vacation gone awry when a speedboat collides with her husband's small craft, changing their lives forever. Crimmins (The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People and When My Parents Were My Age They Were Old... or Who Are You Calling Middle-Aged?) is used to writing with wit, self-effacing humor, and a warmth that can bring readers to their knees--or at least to tears of laughter. But in this stunning memoir about her husband's brain injury and the subsequent fallout, Crimmins has outdone herself, bringing all her sharply honed narrative skills into play as she tackles the life-wrenching drama of witnessing her husband's near death and ensuing rebirth as a very different person.

Crimmins takes readers inside the drama with all the right details and interior feelings to keep us fully mesmerized: her 7-year-old daughter's ashen face, her husband's twitching body, the paramedic's alarming question, "Is your husband one of these people that ordinarily has large pupils?" As deftly as she takes readers inside this personal story of not-quite recovery--more like discovery--she is also able to pan back and show readers the comedic silver lining (the self-important doctors, the moments of mishaps, and of course, the whereabouts of the mysterious Mango Princess) that lies within the cloud of her family's tragedy. Anyone who has endured a head trauma or loved someone who has will be engrossed by this wise and knowledgeable storyteller. The rest of us will have a captivating lesson about the rejuvenation of the brain as well as the human heart. --Gail Hudson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Although it was frightening when Crimmins's husband, Alan, an attorney, suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) while on a family vacation, it was his long-term rehabilitation that proved most daunting, for brain injuries can cause significant personality changes. This chronicle of Al's injury, treatment and rehabilitation shows how perplexing and stressful traumatic brain injury can be for both victim and family. Crimmins (When My Parents Were My Age, They Were Old and Newt Gingrich's Bedtime Stories for Orphans) knows how to tell a story for maximum effect, filling this account with funny and outrageous anecdotes, raw emotion and predictable rage toward HMOs that won't fund optimal treatment. Like many TBI patients, Al became bizarrely uninhibited; Crimmins describes how he swears profusely and masturbates in public, and her worries about suddenly being married to a stranger: "I once had a husband who was doing a dissertation on Samuel Beckett, who had a thing for obscure Japanese cinema.... I can't imagine being married to a man who won't be able to discuss books or go to the theater with me." Despite Alan's extraordinarily good recovery, Crimmins muses, "I miss his dark side.... Now I wince as he chortles over mediocre cartoons... with TBI he has become what he wasn't before, a regular, uncomplicated guy." Though this story is an eye-opener on some levels, it remains essentially shallow. More information on neurological research would have been welcome, and attention to the experience of other TBI families (to which Crimmins devotes only three paragraphs) would have added the perspective that this self-centered account lacks. Agent, Kim Witherspoon.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Crimmins' husband, Alan, suffered a traumatic brain injury in a speedboat crash. This book tells the stories of Alan's slow and irregular return to a reasonably normal existence; of the changing relationships involved, especially that of Cathy and the Crimmins' daughter, Kelly; and of how an HMO impeded a patient's treatment and recovery by misguided attempts at cost cutting. The contrast between the Canadian helicopter trip after Alan's injury and the HMO's refusal to jet him from Canada to Philadelphia graphically illustrates the difference between the Canadian and U.S. medical systems. Flare-ups of anger and impulsiveness created major problems, including the low point when Alan savagely kicked Kelly, and make for blistering reading. Alan's progress, however, was remarkable, the result of scientifically minded, deeply caring physicians and nurses in Canada, where the accident occurred, and in the U.S. Alan eventually returned to work part-time in law and banking, though some of his problems remained. Despite not glossing over appalling details, this is an optimistic book. William Beatty
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"[S]imply amazing. [An] astonishing alchemical story of tragedy and recovery."
--Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies

"A portrait of family tragedy all the more poignant for mixing humor with blazing honesty."
--Elle

"Transcends the subject of illness to become an inspiring meditation on the enduring nature of love."
--Us Weekly

Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family.

When her husband Alan is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins' husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality-and the complexities of the heart.

Cathy Crimmins lives with her husband and daughter in Pennsylvania.

Prologue
Accidents divide things into the great Before and After.
"Even before his brain injury, Alan had a hard time remembering names," I'll say. "Since Daddy's accident, I have to work more," I tell our daughter, Kelly. The brain injury community marks time by asking how long someone has been "out of" injury, the same way bereavement counselors ask how long your loved one has been dead. Six months out, two years out, ten years out.
Out of what, exactly?
Out of the giant crevice that has been exploded into the bedrock of your life.
Here's how I see it: One day, you and your family are hiking across a long, solid plain, when out of the sky comes a blazing meteor that just happens to hit one family member on the head. The meteor creates a huge rift in the landscape, dragging the unlucky one down to the bottom of the crevice it has made. You spend the next year on a rescue mission, helping him climb to the top, but when he gets up there, you realize that he has been greatly changed by the hardship. He doesn't know a meteor has hit him. He will never know, really. He only knows that he has spent a lot of time in a dark, confusing place. He left a lot of stuff behind, the stuff he was carrying with him, down in that big hole, and it's impossible to get it all back.
How do you even get him out? Well, you and your family have to jump across the crevice first and then pull him up on the "other" side of your life. Or you have to stay on the side where you were, drag him out, and then all leap together to the other edge of the crater. It's not easy. The chasm between the old life and the new is wider than you think. You could fall into the darkness yourself, trying to jump across.
And the damned crevice is always there, the bad-luck meteor stuck down inside it. You turn your back on it and go on, across that wide plain of life, again. But along the way you have to tell the improbable story of the meteor. You have to describe the big hole in the ground and the little holes it left behind. You dream about the crevice. You dream about the time before the meteor came down without warning. And you can never again hear about anyone getting hit on the head without knowing it is the beginning of a new and bewildering journey.
"Look at what he did with that light," says my husband, Alan, studying a canvas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's the last day of the boffo, much-publicized C?zanne exhibit. Supplied with free last-minute tickets from friends, we jump at the chance to get in under the wire, though we know the gallery will be packed. Stories about the city's C?zanne-crazed summer had reached us in airless hospital rooms, seeming more like reports from another planet than an event we could actually attend.
Alan has a long history of never going through an art exhibit just once. He circles it two or three times or more, returning to study individual paintings in detail. I've usually been cooling my heels in the gift shop for twenty minutes by the time he wanders in.
But today a weak, subdued version of Alan leans forward on a cane, gazing at C?zanne's brushstrokes as he listens to the canned narration clamped onto his head. He has no spare energy to walk around the exhibit more than once -- he'll have to drink in each painting in one thirsty gulp.
Right now I don't care how long he spends in front of each painting. He can stay there all day, wearing his dorky headset and listening to the droning narrator a couple of times for each picture. I'll wait.
"He can still analyze art!" I think. A revelation, like the one only a few weeks before: "He can still read!"
The brain is an amazing organ. The three-pound blob keeps lots of great information up there, like the lyrics to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song, the sensation of your first kiss, and the digits of your childhood phone numbers. Put your brain through a windshield at seventy miles an hour or bash it with a sledgehammer, and then it's a crapshoot. You might remember something or you might not. You might not even recall who was in the room with you five minutes ago. You might not walk or talk again. You might never wake up from that coma. You might wake up and be nasty and aggressive. You might talk in jargon. You might only sing a sitcom theme song, over and over and over.
Alan's brain got run over by a speedboat.
That last sentence reads like a bad country-western song lyric, but it's true. It was a silly, horrible, stupid accident. Only months before touring the C?zanne paintings, Alan was lying in a coma in Kingston, Ontario. A Canadian government helicopter touched down on a highway near the remote lake where we were staying and rushed him to a teaching hospital. In the helicopter Alan began to have seizures and stopped breathing. By the time he was stabilized in the emergency room, doctors and nurses were telling me they didn't know what would happen to him.
"You just love me for my brain," says Alan, smiling in his new affability. I laugh every time he says it, sharp tears stinging the corners of my eyes. We used that phrase all the time when we were work-obsessed graduate students newly in love. Now Alan uses it ironically. His brain has been damaged and will never be the same. His rehabilitation counselor says that the "old" Alan died on July 1, 1996, and a new one arose, created by the rivers and lakes of bruises that coursed over his brain as he lay unconscious in the days after his injury. He is a man with different frontal lobes, and a different personality to match.
Several weeks after his accident, while still in an addled state at a rehabilitation hospital, Alan told a doctor that he felt reborn. "That's a common feeling among our brain injury patients," said Dr. Weinstein.
"I have a question, though," continued Al. "If I had to be reborn, how come I'm still forty-four years old?"