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THE MYSTERY
It all started with the smell of rotting garbage.
In the summer of 2011, retired Ottawa music teacher Allison Woyiwada was plagued by horrible odours that could not be detected by anyone else.
She took to her computer in search of answers and was unnerved by what she discovered: The phenomenon, known as phantosmia, could be caused by anything from a simple infection to a brain tumour or Parkinson’s disease. In late October, her family doctor referred her to The Ottawa Hospital for a brain scan.
Woyiwada and her husband, Robert McMechan, received the results one week before Christmas.
The scan had uncovered a giant aneurysm — a balloon-like bulge in a major blood vessel in her brain. On Christmas Eve, a diagnostic imaging test confirmed the existence of the sleeping giant. The sac of blood measured 2.6 cm by 2.8 cm, about the size of a crabapple.
Neurosurgeon Dr. Howard Lesiuk presented the 60-year-old Woyiwada with some terrible calculus. If she did nothing, and lived with her sleeping giant, she would face a 40 per cent chance of a catastrophic rupture within five years. (Generally, the larger the aneurysm, the greater the risk.) If she opted instead for surgery — a complex operation in a hard-to-reach region of the brain — there was a 10 to 20 per cent chance that she would suffer a stroke or die.
Woyiwada shared her diagnosis with family and friends through an email group labelled, ‘Allison’s Brain.’ On Jan. 20, 2012, in her second update, she told the group that she had made up her mind.
“If it (the aneurysm) can stay put for the new few weeks, I’ll let the surgeons work their magic,” she wrote.
That decision launched Woyiwada on an epic medical odyssey. It would begin with an exceedingly rare type of brain surgery — Woyiwada’s blood would be chilled and her heart stopped — that rendered her, for a brief time, clinically dead.
It would continue through an uncertain recovery when no one was sure, least of all Woyiwada, whether the ‘old Allison’ would return. Three months after her surgery, she had the communication skills of a toddler. Woyiwada was afraid that she might never return to the adult world.
Music, a lifelong devotion, would come to her rescue.
With the help of music therapy — an approach that uses music to reorganize an injured brain — Woyiwada would orchestrate an astonishing comeback.
THE TEACHER
Allison Cameron took up piano as a Grade 4 student in Portage la Prairie, Man. Her aunt owned the local music store which helped satisfy Allison’s voracious appetite for new, more challenging sheet music. She became the pianist for a church choir and a residential school glee club; she played the national anthem each morning at school.
In high school, a guidance counsellor told her about a music degree offered by Brandon University and she leapt at the chance to study something she loved. Allison graduated four years later with a teaching certificate and a yearbook caption that perfectly captured her life’s philosophy: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
In Winnipeg, she launched a career as a music teacher, pursued opportunities as an opera singer, and married a fellow musician and lawyer, Rick Woyiwada. Together they raised two children, Tyler and Marya.
The family moved to Ottawa in 1981 and Woyiwada began her tenure at Hopewell Avenue Public School the next year.
Woyiwada became a much-loved institution at the Ottawa South school, directing the school band and staging countless musicals, many of them original. Known as a dynamic, cheerful, demanding teacher, she earned a deeply loyal following.
When Woyiwada retired in 2008, Hopewell named its music award and one wing of the school in her honour.
Not yet 60, she went to work as an office manager for Robert McMechen, the Ottawa tax lawyer whom she had fallen in love with after splitting up with her husband, Rick, in the early 1990s. Woyiwada and McMechen were making plans to slow down and travel more when she suddenly began to smell garbage in all the wrong places.
THE SURGERY
After several anxiety-inducing delays, Woyiwada’s surgery was set for 8 a.m. on May 28, 2012: The operation required an early start because it was expected to last a full day.
The surgical plan was complex. Woyiwada’s heart and lung function would be taken over by a machine. Her blood would be circulated through the machine and cooled until her body was hypothermic. At a critical point in the surgery, her circulation would be stopped altogether as the aneurysm was removed and her arteries repaired. Woyiwada’s circulation would then be restored and her body slowly rewarmed as surgeons managed the inevitable bleeding.
The technique is known as deep hypothermic circulatory arrest surgery and it has two principal benefits.
Two months after her operation, Allison Woyiwada went outside for the first time since the surgery with her daughter Marya and her husband Robert McMechan.
First, it allows surgeons a short of window of time in which to effect repairs without blood pumping through the brain. Second, the cooling slows down all of the body’s metabolic processes, including cell death. In the brain, cells normally begin to die after about four minutes without oxygen, but deep hypothermia slows that process dramatically.
The surgery, which effectively puts the patient in a state of hibernation or suspended animation, had been performed only once before in Ottawa.
On the morning of her surgery, as she was being wheeled toward the operating theatre, Woyiwada turned to McMechan. “Everything will be OK,” she promised.
The operation took place at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute because it had the heart-lung bypass machine required to interrupt Woyiwada’s circulation and still her heart. A cardiac surgeon, Dr. Roy Masters, inserted a tube through the femoral vein in Woyiwada’s groin and another through her femoral artery. Her circulatory system was redirected into the machine and her blood was cooled until her core body temperature dropped to 16.5 C from 37 C.
Dr. Lesiuk and fellow neurosurgeon Dr. Amin Kassam had planned and rehearsed the operation for weeks with the surgical team.
Ottawa Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Howard Lesiuk says Allison Woyiwada came as close to death as anyone can during surgery.
While Dr. Masters was conducting his closed-chest bypass surgery, the neurosurgeons opened Woyiwada’s skull, exposed her brain, and prepared it for the operation’s climactic phase: when the blood flow in her body would be halted. Once that happened, they would have half an hour to remove the aneurysm and repair the artery since depriving the brain of blood any longer would increase the chance of permanent damage.
When the heart-lung machine was turned off, the surgeons worked quickly. They dissected around Woyiwada’s sleeping giant — it was even larger than they had anticipated — cleaned out some clotted blood, then deflated and collapsed the aneurysm.
Allison Woyiwada’s aneurysm – a balloon-like bulge in a major blood vessel in her brain – measured 2.6 cm by 2.8 cm.
As the clock ticked toward toward 29 minutes, the surgeons finished inserting a set of titanium clips — they act like miniature clothespins — to close what had been the base, or “neck,” of the aneurysm. As Woyiwada’s circulation was restored and her body rewarmed, the surgeons dealt with bleeding brought on by the surge in blood pressure. They inserted drains and left the skull open to allow Woyiwada’s traumatized brain room to swell.
Thirteen hours after the operation began, the surgical team completed its work. Dr. Lesiuk called McMechan, who had kept himself busy all day, painting the couple’s Glengarry Road home.
Lesiuk told him the operation had gone “fairly smoothly” and that the team was happy with the results.
Much later, Lesiuk would tell McMechan that Woyiwada had come “as close to dying as anyone can without actually dying” during surgery. On a 10-point scale of difficulty, he said, the operation was a nine or a 10.
THE MUSIC
Three months after the operation, Marya Woyiwada wheeled her mother to a piano in a public lounge on the second floor of The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus.
Woyiwada’s recovery had been more fraught than anyone had expected. She had been in a medically-induced coma for two weeks to minimize the damage caused by post-operative seizures. She had suffered from infections and had undergone a second operation to replace a shunt.
By late August, she still had immense difficulty communicating. Although voluble at times, her sentences made little sense. Woyiwada’s working memory was not functioning: She could not remember anything that had happened since her surgery. McMechan repeatedly explained to her why she was in hospital. She had trouble concentrating and could not read or write a sentence. Nurses described her as “pleasantly confused.” She sometimes hummed tunes from The Beatles.
Woyiwada was in a wheelchair and still wearing a helmet — the bone flap in her skull had yet to be replaced — when she took her place at the piano. Some sheet music had been left behind.
Woyiwada looked at the piece, the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, adjusted her hands on the keyboard, and played. Beautifully.
Marya was near tears. Woyiwada’s performance proved to Marya — and everyone else — that the ‘old Allison’ was still there, deep inside a muddled brain.
“This was just overwhelming for us: it had a huge emotional impact,” remembers McMechan. “It was a real turning point and I wonder sometimes whether it gave Allison confidence, too, because she could play the piano again.”
Inspired by his wife’s sonata, McMechan searched for ways to incorporate more music into her rehabilitation. He found Cheryl Jones on the Internet.
A longtime Ottawa music teacher, Jones had returned to university to study music therapy after seeing it help two of her students manage terminal illnesses. “I began to see music playing a role in people’s lives that went beyond education,” she says, “and I began to read everything I could find about the neurology of music, the way it stimulates different sites in the brain.”
Backed by a growing body of research, music therapy is today being used to improve the lives of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and to ease the anxiety and isolation of those with depression, schizophrenia and autism.
When Allison Woyiwada first played the piano after her surgery, it was ‘just overwhelming for us: it had a huge emotional impact,’ says her husband, Robert McMechan. ‘It was a real turning point and I wonder sometimes whether it gave Allison confidence, too, because she could play the piano again.
Jones, a music therapist since 2007, was intrigued by the potential that music — singing in particular — held for brain-injured patients struggling to recover their speech and language skills.
Music and speech are closely related: both require melody, rhythm and tempo. Brain scans have revealed that they share some of the same neural networks, while clinical studies have highlighted the singular power of music. There are many documented cases, for instance, in which stroke victims have lost the ability to speak but retain the ability to sing. Similarly, patients with advanced dementia, unable to form a coherent sentence, are sometimes able to belt out songs from their youth.
Jones began to work with Woyiwada in September 2012. At that first meeting, Jones pointed to a cup and Woyiwada called it a “raindrop.” A pen was “a lion.” A briefcase was “a book.”
Since it was obvious Woyiwada needed help finding the right words, Jones devised a plan to use music as a “backdoor” to her brain’s language repository. The idea was to recruit neural networks from the right hemisphere of Woyiwada’s brain — where melody is processed — to make up for damage in the speech centre of her brain’s left hemisphere.
Jones began by associating short phrases such as, “I am tired,” with a simple melody. Playing the notes helped Woyiwada deploy the associated words. She learned to sing them in response to questions such as, “How are you feeling?”
Woyiwada practised on her own and steadily the phrases became more complicated. Sometimes, when Woyiwada couldn’t retrieve the desired words, she would play or hum the melody associated with them. And curiously, once Woyiwada’s vocabulary expanded, her piano playing improved: She was able to perform with more accuracy and expression.
Music and language fed off one another, propelling new gains.
As her vocabulary expanded, Woyiwada began to invent musical scores for longer phrases such as, “Bob and I are getting ready for Antigua. We need to pack our passports and flashlights.” Jones would play the melody and Woyiwada would sing the words. In all, Woyiwada composed more than 75 mnemonic songs during her rehab: about names, household objects and proper nouns.
The music steadily worked its magic. After 15 months, Woyiwada was able to retrieve newly-learned phrases without a melodic cue.
“Cheryl understood what my brain could do and she gave me encouragement,” Woyiwada said of the experience. “She made me believe I could recover.”
Cheryl Jones is now pursuing a PhD in music therapy at the University of Toronto. She wants to understand more about music’s ability to trigger the kind of neuroplastic response, or structural change, that she believes occurred in Allison Woyiwada’s brain.
Cheryl Jones, a music therapist, devised a plan to used music as a “backdoor” to the language centre in Allison Woyiwada’s injured brain.
“I see huge potential for it with brain injuries of all kinds,” she says. “We’re still learning what music can do.”
THE ENCORE
Late last year, Allison Woyiwada returned to the stage.
At a Christmas concert with the Ottawa Brahms Choir, Woyiwada was able to sing in English, French and German. Little more than one year after fearing that she might never again have the ability to make herself understood, Woyiwada completed a bravura performance in three languages.
“It was extraordinary,” remembers her husband.
Today, Woyiwada has few cognitive deficits. She relies on the dictionary for help sometimes and has problems with conversations that take sudden, unexpected shifts, but otherwise she’s back to being the ‘old Allison.’
She doesn’t take her brain for granted anymore. “It still needs some assistance, some prodding,” she says. “But I’m not the kind of person who will sit here and let it smarten up on its own.”
Woyiwada regularly exercises her surgically-repaired brain with crosswords, Sudoku, piano practice and iPad games.
She regards her medical journey as another lesson in a lifetime of teaching. It’s one of the reasons that Woyiwada and her husband, Robert McMechan, have written a book about their experience. That book, Allison’s Brain, was released this week.
Woyiwada credits her surgeons, her family, her speech and music therapists with helping her reclaim her life. But fundamental to that successful recovery, Woyiwada believes, was her faith in hard work: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
That bedrock belief was mined during the most frightening part of her journey: the point at which she had recovered enough to understand that she was not making sense; that some people laughed at her answers. She was deathly afraid that she would be stuck in a world where words held no meaning.
Remembers Woyiwada: “I didn’t think this was going to be my job: to get better. I thought it would all be up to the surgeons. Then it started to dawn on me that it was going to be my job so I had better bloody well get to work on it … I started to work as hard as I could. There’s something in me that’s very stubborn.”
The piano, she says, remains her instrument of freedom.
“The activity of playing allows my mind to do anything it cares to do.”
aduffy@ottawacitizen.com
The book, Allison’s Brain, published by FriesenPress, is available online at http://woyiwada.blogspot.ca/
查看原文...
It all started with the smell of rotting garbage.
In the summer of 2011, retired Ottawa music teacher Allison Woyiwada was plagued by horrible odours that could not be detected by anyone else.
She took to her computer in search of answers and was unnerved by what she discovered: The phenomenon, known as phantosmia, could be caused by anything from a simple infection to a brain tumour or Parkinson’s disease. In late October, her family doctor referred her to The Ottawa Hospital for a brain scan.
Woyiwada and her husband, Robert McMechan, received the results one week before Christmas.
The scan had uncovered a giant aneurysm — a balloon-like bulge in a major blood vessel in her brain. On Christmas Eve, a diagnostic imaging test confirmed the existence of the sleeping giant. The sac of blood measured 2.6 cm by 2.8 cm, about the size of a crabapple.
Neurosurgeon Dr. Howard Lesiuk presented the 60-year-old Woyiwada with some terrible calculus. If she did nothing, and lived with her sleeping giant, she would face a 40 per cent chance of a catastrophic rupture within five years. (Generally, the larger the aneurysm, the greater the risk.) If she opted instead for surgery — a complex operation in a hard-to-reach region of the brain — there was a 10 to 20 per cent chance that she would suffer a stroke or die.
Woyiwada shared her diagnosis with family and friends through an email group labelled, ‘Allison’s Brain.’ On Jan. 20, 2012, in her second update, she told the group that she had made up her mind.
“If it (the aneurysm) can stay put for the new few weeks, I’ll let the surgeons work their magic,” she wrote.
That decision launched Woyiwada on an epic medical odyssey. It would begin with an exceedingly rare type of brain surgery — Woyiwada’s blood would be chilled and her heart stopped — that rendered her, for a brief time, clinically dead.
It would continue through an uncertain recovery when no one was sure, least of all Woyiwada, whether the ‘old Allison’ would return. Three months after her surgery, she had the communication skills of a toddler. Woyiwada was afraid that she might never return to the adult world.
Music, a lifelong devotion, would come to her rescue.
With the help of music therapy — an approach that uses music to reorganize an injured brain — Woyiwada would orchestrate an astonishing comeback.
THE TEACHER
Allison Cameron took up piano as a Grade 4 student in Portage la Prairie, Man. Her aunt owned the local music store which helped satisfy Allison’s voracious appetite for new, more challenging sheet music. She became the pianist for a church choir and a residential school glee club; she played the national anthem each morning at school.
In high school, a guidance counsellor told her about a music degree offered by Brandon University and she leapt at the chance to study something she loved. Allison graduated four years later with a teaching certificate and a yearbook caption that perfectly captured her life’s philosophy: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
In Winnipeg, she launched a career as a music teacher, pursued opportunities as an opera singer, and married a fellow musician and lawyer, Rick Woyiwada. Together they raised two children, Tyler and Marya.
The family moved to Ottawa in 1981 and Woyiwada began her tenure at Hopewell Avenue Public School the next year.
Woyiwada became a much-loved institution at the Ottawa South school, directing the school band and staging countless musicals, many of them original. Known as a dynamic, cheerful, demanding teacher, she earned a deeply loyal following.
When Woyiwada retired in 2008, Hopewell named its music award and one wing of the school in her honour.
Not yet 60, she went to work as an office manager for Robert McMechen, the Ottawa tax lawyer whom she had fallen in love with after splitting up with her husband, Rick, in the early 1990s. Woyiwada and McMechen were making plans to slow down and travel more when she suddenly began to smell garbage in all the wrong places.
THE SURGERY
After several anxiety-inducing delays, Woyiwada’s surgery was set for 8 a.m. on May 28, 2012: The operation required an early start because it was expected to last a full day.
The surgical plan was complex. Woyiwada’s heart and lung function would be taken over by a machine. Her blood would be circulated through the machine and cooled until her body was hypothermic. At a critical point in the surgery, her circulation would be stopped altogether as the aneurysm was removed and her arteries repaired. Woyiwada’s circulation would then be restored and her body slowly rewarmed as surgeons managed the inevitable bleeding.
The technique is known as deep hypothermic circulatory arrest surgery and it has two principal benefits.
Two months after her operation, Allison Woyiwada went outside for the first time since the surgery with her daughter Marya and her husband Robert McMechan.
First, it allows surgeons a short of window of time in which to effect repairs without blood pumping through the brain. Second, the cooling slows down all of the body’s metabolic processes, including cell death. In the brain, cells normally begin to die after about four minutes without oxygen, but deep hypothermia slows that process dramatically.
The surgery, which effectively puts the patient in a state of hibernation or suspended animation, had been performed only once before in Ottawa.
On the morning of her surgery, as she was being wheeled toward the operating theatre, Woyiwada turned to McMechan. “Everything will be OK,” she promised.
The operation took place at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute because it had the heart-lung bypass machine required to interrupt Woyiwada’s circulation and still her heart. A cardiac surgeon, Dr. Roy Masters, inserted a tube through the femoral vein in Woyiwada’s groin and another through her femoral artery. Her circulatory system was redirected into the machine and her blood was cooled until her core body temperature dropped to 16.5 C from 37 C.
Dr. Lesiuk and fellow neurosurgeon Dr. Amin Kassam had planned and rehearsed the operation for weeks with the surgical team.
Ottawa Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Howard Lesiuk says Allison Woyiwada came as close to death as anyone can during surgery.
While Dr. Masters was conducting his closed-chest bypass surgery, the neurosurgeons opened Woyiwada’s skull, exposed her brain, and prepared it for the operation’s climactic phase: when the blood flow in her body would be halted. Once that happened, they would have half an hour to remove the aneurysm and repair the artery since depriving the brain of blood any longer would increase the chance of permanent damage.
When the heart-lung machine was turned off, the surgeons worked quickly. They dissected around Woyiwada’s sleeping giant — it was even larger than they had anticipated — cleaned out some clotted blood, then deflated and collapsed the aneurysm.
Allison Woyiwada’s aneurysm – a balloon-like bulge in a major blood vessel in her brain – measured 2.6 cm by 2.8 cm.
As the clock ticked toward toward 29 minutes, the surgeons finished inserting a set of titanium clips — they act like miniature clothespins — to close what had been the base, or “neck,” of the aneurysm. As Woyiwada’s circulation was restored and her body rewarmed, the surgeons dealt with bleeding brought on by the surge in blood pressure. They inserted drains and left the skull open to allow Woyiwada’s traumatized brain room to swell.
Thirteen hours after the operation began, the surgical team completed its work. Dr. Lesiuk called McMechan, who had kept himself busy all day, painting the couple’s Glengarry Road home.
Lesiuk told him the operation had gone “fairly smoothly” and that the team was happy with the results.
Much later, Lesiuk would tell McMechan that Woyiwada had come “as close to dying as anyone can without actually dying” during surgery. On a 10-point scale of difficulty, he said, the operation was a nine or a 10.
THE MUSIC
Three months after the operation, Marya Woyiwada wheeled her mother to a piano in a public lounge on the second floor of The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus.
Woyiwada’s recovery had been more fraught than anyone had expected. She had been in a medically-induced coma for two weeks to minimize the damage caused by post-operative seizures. She had suffered from infections and had undergone a second operation to replace a shunt.
By late August, she still had immense difficulty communicating. Although voluble at times, her sentences made little sense. Woyiwada’s working memory was not functioning: She could not remember anything that had happened since her surgery. McMechan repeatedly explained to her why she was in hospital. She had trouble concentrating and could not read or write a sentence. Nurses described her as “pleasantly confused.” She sometimes hummed tunes from The Beatles.
Woyiwada was in a wheelchair and still wearing a helmet — the bone flap in her skull had yet to be replaced — when she took her place at the piano. Some sheet music had been left behind.
Woyiwada looked at the piece, the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, adjusted her hands on the keyboard, and played. Beautifully.
Marya was near tears. Woyiwada’s performance proved to Marya — and everyone else — that the ‘old Allison’ was still there, deep inside a muddled brain.
“This was just overwhelming for us: it had a huge emotional impact,” remembers McMechan. “It was a real turning point and I wonder sometimes whether it gave Allison confidence, too, because she could play the piano again.”
Inspired by his wife’s sonata, McMechan searched for ways to incorporate more music into her rehabilitation. He found Cheryl Jones on the Internet.
A longtime Ottawa music teacher, Jones had returned to university to study music therapy after seeing it help two of her students manage terminal illnesses. “I began to see music playing a role in people’s lives that went beyond education,” she says, “and I began to read everything I could find about the neurology of music, the way it stimulates different sites in the brain.”
Backed by a growing body of research, music therapy is today being used to improve the lives of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and to ease the anxiety and isolation of those with depression, schizophrenia and autism.
When Allison Woyiwada first played the piano after her surgery, it was ‘just overwhelming for us: it had a huge emotional impact,’ says her husband, Robert McMechan. ‘It was a real turning point and I wonder sometimes whether it gave Allison confidence, too, because she could play the piano again.
Jones, a music therapist since 2007, was intrigued by the potential that music — singing in particular — held for brain-injured patients struggling to recover their speech and language skills.
Music and speech are closely related: both require melody, rhythm and tempo. Brain scans have revealed that they share some of the same neural networks, while clinical studies have highlighted the singular power of music. There are many documented cases, for instance, in which stroke victims have lost the ability to speak but retain the ability to sing. Similarly, patients with advanced dementia, unable to form a coherent sentence, are sometimes able to belt out songs from their youth.
Jones began to work with Woyiwada in September 2012. At that first meeting, Jones pointed to a cup and Woyiwada called it a “raindrop.” A pen was “a lion.” A briefcase was “a book.”
Since it was obvious Woyiwada needed help finding the right words, Jones devised a plan to use music as a “backdoor” to her brain’s language repository. The idea was to recruit neural networks from the right hemisphere of Woyiwada’s brain — where melody is processed — to make up for damage in the speech centre of her brain’s left hemisphere.
Jones began by associating short phrases such as, “I am tired,” with a simple melody. Playing the notes helped Woyiwada deploy the associated words. She learned to sing them in response to questions such as, “How are you feeling?”
Woyiwada practised on her own and steadily the phrases became more complicated. Sometimes, when Woyiwada couldn’t retrieve the desired words, she would play or hum the melody associated with them. And curiously, once Woyiwada’s vocabulary expanded, her piano playing improved: She was able to perform with more accuracy and expression.
Music and language fed off one another, propelling new gains.
As her vocabulary expanded, Woyiwada began to invent musical scores for longer phrases such as, “Bob and I are getting ready for Antigua. We need to pack our passports and flashlights.” Jones would play the melody and Woyiwada would sing the words. In all, Woyiwada composed more than 75 mnemonic songs during her rehab: about names, household objects and proper nouns.
The music steadily worked its magic. After 15 months, Woyiwada was able to retrieve newly-learned phrases without a melodic cue.
“Cheryl understood what my brain could do and she gave me encouragement,” Woyiwada said of the experience. “She made me believe I could recover.”
Cheryl Jones is now pursuing a PhD in music therapy at the University of Toronto. She wants to understand more about music’s ability to trigger the kind of neuroplastic response, or structural change, that she believes occurred in Allison Woyiwada’s brain.
Cheryl Jones, a music therapist, devised a plan to used music as a “backdoor” to the language centre in Allison Woyiwada’s injured brain.
“I see huge potential for it with brain injuries of all kinds,” she says. “We’re still learning what music can do.”
THE ENCORE
Late last year, Allison Woyiwada returned to the stage.
At a Christmas concert with the Ottawa Brahms Choir, Woyiwada was able to sing in English, French and German. Little more than one year after fearing that she might never again have the ability to make herself understood, Woyiwada completed a bravura performance in three languages.
“It was extraordinary,” remembers her husband.
Today, Woyiwada has few cognitive deficits. She relies on the dictionary for help sometimes and has problems with conversations that take sudden, unexpected shifts, but otherwise she’s back to being the ‘old Allison.’
She doesn’t take her brain for granted anymore. “It still needs some assistance, some prodding,” she says. “But I’m not the kind of person who will sit here and let it smarten up on its own.”
Woyiwada regularly exercises her surgically-repaired brain with crosswords, Sudoku, piano practice and iPad games.
She regards her medical journey as another lesson in a lifetime of teaching. It’s one of the reasons that Woyiwada and her husband, Robert McMechan, have written a book about their experience. That book, Allison’s Brain, was released this week.
Woyiwada credits her surgeons, her family, her speech and music therapists with helping her reclaim her life. But fundamental to that successful recovery, Woyiwada believes, was her faith in hard work: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
That bedrock belief was mined during the most frightening part of her journey: the point at which she had recovered enough to understand that she was not making sense; that some people laughed at her answers. She was deathly afraid that she would be stuck in a world where words held no meaning.
Remembers Woyiwada: “I didn’t think this was going to be my job: to get better. I thought it would all be up to the surgeons. Then it started to dawn on me that it was going to be my job so I had better bloody well get to work on it … I started to work as hard as I could. There’s something in me that’s very stubborn.”
The piano, she says, remains her instrument of freedom.
“The activity of playing allows my mind to do anything it cares to do.”
aduffy@ottawacitizen.com
The book, Allison’s Brain, published by FriesenPress, is available online at http://woyiwada.blogspot.ca/
查看原文...
