Starting Again After a Brain Injury

By Jane Rosette

Published: October 8^th, accessed: October 16th 

Summary:

                  Jane Rosette suffered through traumatic brain injury when she damaged her right temporal lobe due to a car accident. In turn, she lost her long-term memory and has been a brain injury patient at Harvard’s medical school ever since this incident. This changed Rosette’s life for several years and it wasn’t until she was 45 that she remembered significant things from her past, such as her childhood home in which she spent 17 years of her life. This incident caused Rosette’s life to change drastically. Not only is it hard trying to recollection people from the past, Rosette claims that people that have known her for a long time seem to have lost their views on her. She can’t recall them being part of her life anymore.  Even with these sufferings, Rosette’s friend Andrée figures out a successful way that helped her access information that was long lost in her brain. He helps her get out of her “shocked state of mind” through the process of neuroplasticity. Over the period of time, she started to regain her memory through her dreams, and then later through her writings and photography. After four and a half years of suffering through constant memory loss, Rosette realizes that the process of her right temporal lobe healing has finally commenced.

Response:

                  The reason I chose this article is because Jane Rosette suffered through something very similar compared to the patients in Miss Ratched’s ward as explained by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest.With all the references to society and its acceptance, Kesey hints that people need to be “fixed” to gain their acceptance into society. As shown in the article, Rosette’s mental issue has caused her to become a “guinea pig” that is used for experimenting simply because she wasn’t able to fulfil the expectations of society. As depicted in the article that to gain her approval into society, Rosette had to “fix” her issue through the process of neuroplasticity. Similarly, the novel portrays the patients in the ward to be flaws of society and to return, they must conform into a better person, mentally. In the end, it’s acceptance into society that matters. Even though the patients believed they beat “the combine”, they had no idea that they had been out-played by them instead. To connect the article to this idea, Jane Rosette’s friends and family didn’t look at her the same way. She didn’t know who they were anymore, which caused them to drift apart. This changed her point of view on society and looked for opportunities to crawl back into acceptance. Her friend, Andrée, could represent the Combine in an indirect way. As the combine acts to fix the patients to send them back as “good harvest”, Andrée’s duty in society doesn’t seem to be any different at all.

Vocabulary:

1.    A. At 45, I was jolted into an entirely new existence.B. Jolted: The motion of pushing or pulling someone/something abruptly, or with sudden motion. Originates from the words; joll, which means to strike and the word jot, which means to bump.
C. After arriving late to class, I jolted the English room’s door as it seemed to be jammed.

2.   A. I am told that my work before the accident pertained to the AIDS pandemic
B. Pertained: To belong to some sort of group in a manner that you are contributing to the group. Originates from the Latin word,pertinēre, which translates to“to reach to.”
C. To get a good grade on our blog assignment, we must pertain to the criteria and instuctions.

3.   A. I am sometimes fed my own résumé by strangers in the street.
B. Résumé : A résumé is a list of one’s accomplishments put together so they can be used for purposes such as job applications. The word résumé is the past participle form of the French verb résumer, which simply means to resume.
C. As students, we would have an almost-blank résumé which makes getting a job almost as impossible as getting an “A” in Mr. Plonka’s class.