I admit it: I am an impatient and intolerant reader. Bad writing and stupidity will send me into a rant against an author after a mere page, and I have no compunction about ditching a book completely.<\/p>\n
I recently assigned myself to read memoirs written by survivors of ruptured brain aneurysms, since I’ve been thinking about writing one myself<\/a>. I was prepared for there\u00a0to be bad writing and stupidity.<\/p>\n But not like this one.<\/p>\n Amy Van Patten Ofenbeck\u00a0was 26, a TV anchor in Ft. Meyers when she collapsed at the gym with a ruptured aneurysm. Eight surgeries later, the best job she can get is writing item descriptions for Goodwill.com.<\/p>\n Her book – “Brain Matters: A True Story of Survival<\/a>” – is only 74 pages, and the bad writing begins on the first page. Amy comes across as having the intellect of a chihuahua.<\/p>\n I read the whole thing – twice – and gave it a 4-star\u00a0positive\u00a0review.<\/p>\n Why not 1 star? Because of the bad writing and stupidity.\u00a0That’s what made it such a good book.<\/p>\n This is a wholly authentic account of a young woman who gets hit by a knockout punch to the brain, and then just keeps getting hit over and over. \u00a0She never seems to see the next punch coming.<\/p>\n Because, when you have\u00a0brain trauma, you don’t.<\/p>\n As the reader you do<\/strong> see it coming, and it’s so painful to watch that you just want her to stop trying. \u00a0You actually get angry that she is still trying.<\/p>\n “Honestly! What is wrong with this woman!?” I exclaimed at one point. “Why does she keep trying to do this job when she can’t even –?”<\/p>\n Oh.<\/p>\n It’s not just\u00a0her narration of the events themselves\u00a0that tells us about the effects of multiple brain surgeries. It’s\u00a0her “bad writing” and “stupidity” that show us exactly the results of the trauma.<\/p>\n Brain damage, short-term memory loss, psychosis, debilitating head and neck pain, and lower IQ – those are what remains after Amy has eight surgeries and months of rehab. The rupture, paralyzed vocal cords, a brain cyst, and constant pressure from a shunt\u00a0that didn’t properly drain fluid – those got fixed, but the rest are permanent disabilities.<\/p>\n Amy\u00a0writes about these hellacious years and her failings with such directness and naive confusion that we are more aware than Amy is of how bad her condition\u00a0is.<\/p>\n When she tries to do her old job at the TV station,<\/p>\n some of my other co-workers were new and didn’t understand my situation. Some of the producers also questioned me a lot about my stories and I would sometimes get irked looks from other reporters there when I was pitching my ideas. … I found that if management liked my ideas they gave them to someone else [to report and write]. I really wasn’t sure why but I’d still willingly hand over my notes. Often times I was left with nothing to do which was aggravating and boring. I was getting frustrated but I hung in there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No one but Amy could possibly have been surprised when she was fired. “I think they just decided I wasn’t any good,” she\u00a0writes.<\/p>\n Oh Amy.<\/p>\n Yet she\u00a0continues to be enthused even when she’s working at a golf pro shop and then at a gym – and she can’t do those simple jobs, either.<\/p>\n I can relate to this book because I felt so stupid for the first four months of recovery after my brain surgery<\/a>. I was not sure I’d ever be able to recover my cognitive skills enough to do my work. On bad days<\/a>, I still have doubts – but I’m no longer worried that I won’t be able to hold down a job.<\/p>\n Amy’s collapse, though, was in October 1997. Eighteen years later, neurosurgery has come a very long way. I had none of the recurring problems that Amy did – in large part, because neurosurgeons learned so much from their experiences with people like her. Neurosurgery got better, even though Amy didn’t.<\/p>\n At the book’s end, she is working at Goodwill and wakes up every morning from the pain.<\/p>\n That could have been me.<\/p>\n I’m just trying to survive and live a happy productive life. I think I’m doing that for the most part. I still face health challenges every day, but I’m so used to it it doesn’t faze me anymore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Today’s penny is a flawed and shining 2005. That’s the year Amy won the Ft. Meyers Mayor’s Alliance Award for people with disabilities and their workplaces.<\/p>\n I was beginning to embrace the fact that I was a disabled worker. … It was a real honor to receive that award.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I admit it: I am an impatient and intolerant reader. Bad writing and stupidity will send me into a rant against an author after a mere page, and I have no compunction about ditching a book completely. I recently assigned myself to read memoirs written by survivors of ruptured brain aneurysms, since I’ve been thinking … read more Honestly Amy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[16,485,596,493,981,980,504,259],"class_list":["post-8131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-16","tag-aneurysm","tag-book","tag-brain","tag-disabled","tag-medical","tag-recovery","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8131"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8135,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8131\/revisions\/8135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}