My Beautiful Broken Brain Page #6

Perfect for your condition,

I would say.

Isn't it? [chuckling]

[groans]

[Andrew] You were telling me

that you'd had a seizure.

So, tell me what happened there.

Well, I've been doing this, um,

electromagnetic therapy thing.

Uh, I forget what it...

See... [stammering] I've regressed.

-I have regressed since the seizure.

-Yeah.

Um, but... Um, but yeah, it's, um...

Yeah, some sort of...

-Um, transmagnetic...

-Yes, I know what you mean.

I don't have much experience

of the technique.

It would not surprise me at all

if it were a potential side effect

to the treatment,

but I don't know for definite.

Brain injury puts you at risk of seizures,

so you were at risk of having a seizure

with or without the treatment,

so, difficult to say, for me,

whether it was directly related.

Did anyone start you

on any treatment for that?

-Yeah, I have to take it every day.

-Yes.

[Lotje] And it's for people

who have epileptic fits.

[Andrew] Yeah.

So, I don't know if that...

you know, if that includes me,

because it might just have been a one-off.

I hope it was a one-off.

It's a bit difficult to tell,

but probably the sensible thing for you

at the moment is to be on the treatment.

Yeah.

And that's... the most likely situation

where this won't happen again,

which is, I'm sure,

what you would like at the moment.

[voice grows distant] The medication

can make people a little bit drowsy

and feel not quite themselves. [echoing]

[Lotje] I remember Jan,

my brother, saying...

Uh, "Don't worry,

you'll be better in a few weeks."

You know, hopefully making that--

making that assumption.

And some people do recover

from, um, strokes very quickly.

But, in my case, language-wise,

I certainly didn't.

So, now I'm thinking...

maybe none of...

me will recover quickly ever.

Anything can happen

at any time to any degree.

Um, so...

I better not have faith in anything.

[Lotje] Mmm...

-[Jan] Here we are, "Provoked seizure."

-[Lotje] Here, yeah.

-Did you ask him about provoked seizure?

-Yeah.

-And what did he say about that?

-He doesn't really know.

You know, Andy Elsmore is a surgeon.

-A brain surgeon.

-Okay.

-That's his specialty.

-Yeah.

So anything else

needs to be referred to other people.

In all fairness...

it sounds like you got

no answers from him at all.

Well...

Well, what kind of answers would you like?

Some answer.

Like, "I don't know" is an answer.

Like what?

Like, "Okay, what are these

flashes of light I had?"

"Fits." "And should...

Should I have been told that they were?"

He can't answer those questions.

-Why not?

-Because he wasn't there.

He doesn't know anything about it

other than what I've told him.

And what did he say?

He said, "I don't know."

[Jan] I was unaware actually, myself,

that there is a very high risk,

a one-in-five risk pretty much,

of this happening anyway

if you've had a hemorrhage,

in the first year after.

So... [sniffles] ...you know...

I should have probably

been more prepared for the fact

that this kind of thing could happen.

For some reason, we weren't,

I mean, as a family.

And Lotje wasn't either.

[Lotje] I mean, there's no way of knowing.

It's just like...

It's just unfortunate.

Well, the thing is, it's likely to have

been a provoked seizure, that's the thing,

but it's just a question

of what provoked it.

[Lotje] Yeah.

[Lotje] ...very slowly.

I was doing a lot better,

but now I've gone backwards again

since this, uh...

Show me if you can read this.

[chuckling]

-This?

-Yeah.

[Dr. Afraim] Just take your time. Just...

[Lotje's voice echoing] "John...

Gifford...

was... the... was the..."

[Dr. Afraim] Just remind me again how long

the whole thing lasted for.

When did your speech return?

[Jan] Well, the thing is that

the actual fits happened in hospital.

-I see.

-So it was many, many hours.

It's probably about--

Um, after the fits, Lotje slept.

So by the time she was speaking again,

it was nine o'clock in the evening.

[Dr. Afraim] Okay.

Whether the seizures were triggered

or made worse by the treatment

is difficult to answer.

-[Jan] I have a question...

-[Dr. Afraim] Yes?

...which is, um, the flashes,

were they seizures or not?

-Uh, they're not seizures, per se.

-[Jan] Mmm.

I think it may be that the brain

was sort of primed.

Uh, you've got, uh,

abnormal brain there anyway.

So it may be they conspired

to give rise to what was,

what sounded like

a very prolonged seizure.

In a very small proportion of patients,

generalized seizures can carry fatality,

actually.

And certainly patients can die,

for example,

in their sleep from a seizure.

So, generalized seizures

certainly need to be treated.

Here I am on my last visitation

to Queen Square.

Curious to see... [sniffles]

...how much worse... off I am...

than I was...

before the...

the fits set in...

and certainly disturbed and destroyed...

my brain and my mind.

[exhaling]

[Dr. Alex] So, this graph...

it turned out that you had

the tDCS in the first week.

'Cause, remember, we were blinded to that,

so we had to, um, unblind ourselves.

And the biggest improvement was,

in fact, in the first week.

So you can see that your reading speeds,

actually for both trained

and untrained words,

um, both of them increased dramatically.

-Oh, wow.

-Quite dramatically there.

So you've gone from an average

of around about 2.2 seconds per word

down to an average of about 1.5 seconds.

That's about 40% improvement

in reading speed, something like that.

-Wow.

-Yeah.

-So that's quite impressive.

-That's great.

-So that is good news.

-Thank you.

Well, it's all your hard work, really.

And we would predict this.

So, generally speaking,

there's a big effect of practice.

But there's a hint here

that there's an effect of the tDCS.

Scientifically, it's unfortunate

because you had the seizure,

that the last time point

would've helped us.

So, if you hadn't had the fit

and you had gone down again here,

in other words,

you'd improved again,

that would've been good evidence that

there wasn't a real effect of the tDCS,

but because we lost that last time point,

we can't really answer that question.

I'm sorry about that. [chuckling]

It's not your fault.

Absolutely not your fault at all.

[Dr. Alex] The data that we got from you,

we are very encouraged by.

And we're using this to put together

a grant application to,

obviously to do it in more subjects.

So all of this stuff, you know,

promising, but not conclusive,

is gonna go into an application

to try and do it on a bigger level.

[Lotje] Did I understand

correctly that, um...

you're not going to be testing any more

zapping on brain hemorrhage people?

[Dr. Alex] Yeah, I think we'll...

We'll probably put that in

as one of the exclusion criteria.

Obviously, we want to be safe,

but on the other hand,

if you exclude a load of people

in these studies,

then when you finally publish it, um...

there will be no evidence

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