Saturday, November 25, 2006

Worries About My Own 3 LBS

3 LBS is a new CBS drama that focuses on a superstar neurosurgeon who sees his patients as mechanical vehicles driven by brains that are nothing more than 3 lbs of "wires in a box" and has a bedside manner to match, and his new apprentice who, in addition to being an outstanding neurosurgeon in his own right, sees and warmly treats his patients much more holistically.

In last Tuesday's episode (it's on opposite Fox's "House," and several critics have lambasted it for being an insipidly unoriginal amalgam of "House" and Grey's Anatomy"), a woman with no history of epilepsy begins convulsing from a grand mal seizure in the middle of a store and is subsequently diagnosed as having a tumor on the left side of her brain. Her doctors don't want to operate because if they do, the woman will lose her language ability. They want to zap the tumor with radiation instead to minimize damage to her language faculties, but she refuses because she's pregnant and doesn't want to irradiate and destroy the fetus. When her doctors discover that she has uncommonly strong language capability in the right side of her brain, they offer to do the surgery. They tell her that she'll never be able to speak afterward but might well be able to process language to some degree in her right brain to make up for what she loses from the surgery to her left brain, and that if she doesn't have the surgery, she'll surely die.

I've long worried that I might be struck someday by an injury or disease that severely damages my left brain, permanently depriving me of my modestly superior language ability, and leaves only the grossly inferior non-verbal abilities of my defective right brain in its wake. If this were to happen, I would surely want to die, for what would I have left to live for? I would be of absolutely no use to myself or to anyone else. I would be little more than a mute or incoherently babbling idiot.

I pray that this fate never befalls me or that, if it does, I will have the strength and means to do what needs to be done. But, more importantly, I pray for the willpower to do my best with the abilities that I have for as long as I have them.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nagarjuna,

Since your language skills are dependent on other abilities that you must have that are the source of what you talk and write about, I cannot discern what deficiencies or disabilities there are that cause you so much distress.

It is true that you haven't written about the economy or auto maintenence or video games or music -- that I'm aware of.

You do have opinions, so you must have confidence in your analytical skills. You're interested in furthest reaches of spiritual attainment, so I have to surmise that you are "all there."

I think I read somewhere that we are born with more synaptic connections than we have as we grow through childhood into adulthood and that our skills relate to how must nonsense we've cleared out of the way [in the form of killed-off synaptic connections]. Perhaps you've 'lost' some things you think you would like to have; but your loss is the very thing that gives you the intense and special skills that you have.

Unknown said...

Wait a minute. You DO write about music. What am I talking about!?