How a brain injury made me smarter: Ann Zuccardy at TEDxPhoenixville

I could ask directions in just about any romance language.

I was a voracious reader.

I was well respected for my business, savvy?

I could talk to anyone on just about anything

people used to say to me. So anything you haven't done so anything you don't know.

I knew I was smart

because of the information I had in my head.

and everyone else knew it too.

And then, 2 years ago.

almost to this day

I fell in a bathtub

in Germany.

as I was getting into the top to take a shower.

had one foot in the tub and the other foot out of the tub.

and the foot that was in the top slipped out from under me, and I went bunk forward, forehead first

into a tile wall.

The leg that was behind me hit the side of the top. Oh, that smarts!

I didn't lose consciousness. I felt

a little drunk. Afterwards

I slurred my words a little bit.

but I felt mostly okay. So I flew home the next day.

Then I returned to work. A couple of days later, and things began to get progressively worse.

I was stumbling a lot.

I was slurring my words.

and then I began to vomit.

but still I thought.

Hey, I've given birth at home in my living room with no drugs. I can handle this.

I've got you.

but I couldn't handle it.

and I finally left work that day and went straight to my doctors.

and they sent me straight to the hospital.

What I found out I had had is called a coup contracu head injury.

And what that means is this

picture

your brain like a bowl full of jello.

So the jello is your brain.

and the bowl is your skull.

Now imagine what happens if you take that bowl and you shove it with all the force of your body weight

into a tile wall.

What happens to that, Jello?

Well.

it hits the side of the bowl where the impact happened.

and then what happens?

Well, as Jello does, it will bounce back and hit the other side of the bowl.

So a coup contrecoup head injury means

that there is damage to the brain

both

the point of impact

and the point opposite the impact

when I first got to the hospital.

This is what my brain injury looked like.

Lovely. Huh!

I know it's not. That's not. My head

made a mistake.

That's the leg that hit the side of the tub. As I fell forward

I thought that was my problem.

I'd show you a picture of my brain and my head.

but it actually looked pretty good

from the outside.

But truly

I could have died.

Falls are a leading source of traumatic brain injury or TBI related death.

and what I had

is considered a mild traumatic brain injury or an mTBI.

account for about 75% of all brain injuries in this country

turns out

I had suffered damage to both

frontal lobe

and my occipital lobe.

The prescription was brain rest.

brain rest means

no stimulation, no activity.

It means no TV,

no reading, no computer, no driving, no exercise.

It basically means shut off your brain.

That's kind of like asking a fish not to swim.

It's really hard for a smart person.

After about 3 months of brain rest

things had only improved slightly.

I had to quit my job.

My whole life was falling apart

because I fell in a bathtub.

Things that had been previously very easy, that I had done without even thinking.

were suddenly very difficult.

I used to be the fastest reader in the world. Now

a page of text

looks like this.

Crossing a street is really difficult for me. It's very hard for me to process information when it's coming from multiple directions.

and

that can get you run over.

Going downstairs is very difficult for me.

It's really hard for me to see where one step ends and where I need to put my foot to step down

short-term memory

on.

I can't even remember what day it is.

I'm not just talking about the day I'm talking about like the day of the week, and then I go to look it up, and it's out of my head in

a minute or 2,

and then I got really depressed.

And it wasn't because

of what I couldn't do anymore.

It was because I was no longer

smart.

In case you haven't noticed. I am fiercely independent.

So as time went on and some things did did gradually improve, I decided I wanted to go out and start doing things again. I wanted to take a walk.

but to do that you have to be able to cross a street.

So I developed this adaptation for crossing a street, but I didn't even realize I was doing it. So this is how I cross a street when I need to cross a busy street like out here.

I scan

the crowd.

and I find the most responsible looking person. Often

I wasn't expecting a laugh. But thank you often. That's a mother with a small child they are responsible. So then I kind of just like attach myself to them

and follow them across the street until I feel safe.

When I go downstairs

I grip the banister with all my might.

and then I use my foot

as a feeler to feel where I need to step down.

Every morning

when I get up

I look up the day of the week.

and then I write it down on any little scrap of paper I can find many of them, and I put them everywhere. Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday.

I remembered what today was.

and still, I'll forget later.

What's life like now?

Well, I judge every day

by how I feel when I wake up in the morning

by how many beers it may seem like I've had the night before. So

a 2 beer morning

bearable

a 4 beer morning.

Seems

I may still be lots of fun. I look normal. I might stumble a little. I might slur my words, but I still look pretty good.

A Shakespeare morning

6, beer, morning means I'm definitely going to fall. I'm going to walk into walls, and I might get into the car to go to the grocery store and forget how to get there.

Sometimes

on a 6 beer morning.

I can see words in my head.

simple words like

cat dog coffee.

I can see them, but I can't get them out of my mouth.

So on a 6 beer morning, I know I'm going to have to rest until the beer wears off.

So my life now, 2 years later.

slower.

simpler.

less stress

back when I was that woman, that smart woman with a high-powered job

power through anything I could use my intellect to override my body.

Guess what

can't do that anymore?

My brain shuts off

and it commands me to rest.

I used to think

that smart was all about information.

but it wasn't until

my husband and others pointed out the creative adaptations that I had made that I realized the true paradox of smart.

maybe

still smart.

maybe in a different way.

thinking a lot about thinking

and about what makes people smart.

creative, adaptive mechanisms make us smart.

Creative innovation.

I realized now that was always a part of me.

but it took an unplugging of my brain

from that intellectual piece

to get back in touch with that.

It used to be a very small part of me.

Now

I lead with it.

Resilience makes us smart.

When I look back at my life, my career, parenting, education, all of the things that I've done.

I realize also that resilience has always been part of my innate core smart.

And again.

when I had to unplug my brain.

I learned to rely on that again.

Remember that movie big with Tom Hanks.

Remember how he was a little kid in a man's body.

and he was working in that toy company, and he was working his way up to an executive position.

He didn't have

adult knowledge or ideas, adult ideas of how things should be.

He was using his imagination.

He had no perceptual notions of how

he should be in that job.

Curiosity

that made him smart.

I used to think

that Smart was about how much knowledge I had.

Now

I define, smart

as my craving to learn

creative, adaptive mechanisms.

resilience.

creativity.

curiosity.

This is the new smart.

Thank you.