Protected: When Hopes Take Flight

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Brain Wonders: Girl wakes from coma speaking new language

by Renée Canada

The brain is a fascinating and complex organ. Not only is it in charge of our body’s breathing, heart rate, and other autonomic functions, but it controls our body’s balance, posture, and coordination of movement including for vision. Even more fascinating is its role in mood, reasoning, decision-making, and abstract thought.

Despite the protection of a hard skull, the brain is a delicate organ, subject to deficiencies and injury. Some of you might have read neurologist Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which described case histories of patients who had altered brain functions, many of which resulted in unusual phenomena such as spontaneous reminiscences as altered perceptions. In one case, for example, “The Lost Mariner”, due to a brain disorder caused by the lack of vitamin B1, lost the ability to form new memories. Although he is living in the late ’70s/early ’80s, he believes it is 1945 and can remember nothing of his life since the end of WWII. Another patient has a visual impairment where he cannot recognize ordinary objects like a flower, a glove, or human faces. He tries to shake hands with a parking meter.

However, the brain is often capable of adapting to difficult circumstances. For example, studies of children have shown that if the left hemisphere of the brain, often the center of specialized language abilities, is damaged in a child, the child may develop language in the right hemisphere instead. The younger the child, the better the recovery.

Some of you might have heard of Foreign Accent Syndrome. This extremely rare brain disorder can result from a stroke or head injury. CindyLou Romberg suffered a depressed skull fracture after falling out of a moving truck. After a chiropractic adjustment, despite never having left her small town in Washington state, she began speaking with a Russian accent, though she sometimes also slips into replacing her w’s with v’s like a Swede. After a stroke, Linda Walker from Newcastle, UK, lost her Geordie accent and began speaking alternately with a Jamaican, French Canadian, Italian, or Slovak accent.

So, taking it one step further, the latest news of a Croatian teenager waking from a coma speaking fluent German didn’t surprise me at all. I find it fascinating what the brain will retain or further develop, even as we age. The mind is a terrible thing to take for granted, and hearing stories like this make me cherish and want to expand and develop my mind to the fullest possible. Feel free to comment with any links to sites that encourage exercising your brain.

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Tucson School Say Adiós to Oreos

by Renée Canada

I remember the days of high school lunches consisting purely of those Friendly Sundae Cups. As an high honor roll student all through sophomore year, I would just flash my proudly earned “golden” card, which was basically a free pass to goodies at the school store and treats at lunch, and voila, I would have a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Sundae in hand. I felt like I was doing something illicit that I would later regret. Have you seen how many calories are in that small little cup? I had: 430, with 25g of fat, 29g of sugars. I knew I was more than tripling my caloric intake from my normal daily lunches of bologna and cheese sandwich, with carrots or grapes if I was lucky.

I remember gazing longingly at my friends’ lunches in middle school. Tresa’s mother always tucked little notes into her lunches which always included cookies or some such goodies, in addition to her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, on white bread, cut up in different shapes. My best friend Jenn, who always had ham and cheese sandwiches with mustard on white bread, usually had chips and/or a cookie as well. She never finished her entire meal.

So I with the measly baloney and cheese with mayo sandwiches on wheat bread always sniffed around like a vulture when I was done with my meals, waiting for everyone at the table to proclaim they were done. An apple would be abandoned. I’d eat it. Half a bag of chips would lay on the table ignored. I’d eat that too. And if someone had peanut butter and fluff, the biggest taboo in sandwiches, you can bet I’d figure out some way to trade up for that–usually with someone else’s leftovers.

Today, I can no longer stomach half the food I so hungrily scavenged from my lunch pals. I prefer my oatmeal with almond milk, apples, raisins and walnuts. My wheat bread with organic turkey, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mustard for lunch. Hey, I even drink water 24/7, and I actually love it. I hardly ever drink soda, and I look for juice that actually has, you know, juice as its main ingredient. If we had a Whole Foods in town, I’d be pouring way too much money each week buying my groceries there. When I see food or beverages with high fructose corn syrup in it, I cast it off as if it had the devil’s handprint on it.

So reading today’s story about a Tucson elementary school’s decision to put all processed foods on their “no list” made me want to give someone a high-five, especially in the face of this nation’s obesity epidemic. With lunch meat and flavored yogurt on the no-food list, one wonders what children can consume. Teachers trade quesadillas made with white flour tortillas with whole wheat wraps topped with peanut butter and honey, which to be honest, sounds like an appetizing alternative. School Director and Founder Nancy Aiken may have a point, according to the article: “If all U.S. families allowed her school’s food rules…child obesity would be a rare problem.”

The only thing that makes is sad is thinking about birthdays at Children’s Success Academy: there will be no birthday cupcakes or cake for these kids. There is value in moderation or creativity with alternative ingredients. One can hardly put a candle on fruit or nuts, which is the school director’s suggested birthday “dessert.” Perhaps I should email the recipe to lip-smacking gluten-free chocolate cupcakes with no sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to Aiken. I think her students would thank me.

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Listening To Your Body

by Renée Canada

With the multiple, daily episodes making stone slabs out of my muscles, I decided it was time to start treating my body with more love. A couple weeks ago, I got my first massage in about two years (had it really been that long?) My wonderful bodyworker Deanna, who has grown used to the ebbs and flows of my body over the more than six years that I’ve been seeing her, was of course concerned by the changes going on with my health.

Deanna, a true master of energy healing, began the massage, as always, by cradling the sacrum, or tailbone, and moving her hands lightly over my lower body. “I’m feeling a really deep spasm in your sacrum,” she said. “Do you feel anything–” She broke off when she looked up at my head and saw my face contorting into the painful twisting of my jaw and cheek muscle contractions. “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t even realize you were going through an episode until I looked up at your face. But I could feel both your legs strongly pulling to the left.”

In just a few moments, she seemed to have figured out the connection between my facial muscle contortions and the weakness of the tailbone I sometimes feel that leads to total loss of strength in my legs, resulting in me either walking the funky chicken or falling in a heap on the floor. For several days after the massage, I felt as if my muscles had loosened up a bit and even when I had the episodes, I was able to release out of them more quickly and much less painfully.

Feeling energized and armed with a new sense of hope after realizing once again I would have to look outside Western medicine for ways to treat this mysterious disorder, I started getting back into doing more hard-core yoga. I’ve been stretching and strengthening my body along with Namaste Yoga on FitTV.

Now I usually detest doing yoga workouts along with a video. The teachers always go too fast, assuming you know all the poses from the start, and it feels like their sole purpose is to show off, not to help you experience any of the benefits of yoga for yourself. Namaste Yoga felt different from day one. The lead instructor started off slowly enough that you could manipulate your body into a posture before moving into the next one. Once she felt you had mastered a sequence, then she moved faster and/or added more challenging poses.

Instead of feeling defeated by yoga, I have been feeling rejuvenated and strengthened by it. I always find myself looking forward to the next episode’s challenges. While it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me especially, it’s been both a boost to my mental attitude as well as a wonderful way to help my body cope and relax more when facing the physical tension of an episode. I am constantly reminding myself: Don’t forget to breathe.

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