Ian’s Story

Ian was precocious; there were no two ways around it. I tried to hide my pride, but as a professor myself, I loved having such a talented little boy. I only wished he’d calm down a bit: his spring and summer allergies that caused him to have sneezing fits also made him rambunctious, his father and I lamented.

One day in June 1984 his sister, a toddler, went for a walk with her babysitter. Deciding after they’d left that he did want to join them after all, Ian, age seven, jumped on the nearest bike (one we had set aside for brake repairs), and pedaled furiously to catch up with the duo. At the bottom of the hill, he apparently failed to look to the left of our seldom-traveled country road, and the car of a mother of three struck him, throwing him across the hood, onto the asphalt. A year later, helmets would be the norm; now, in South Carolina, they were novelties. Ian’s head took the hit.

Twenty-four hours later, after a touch and go period where no one knew if he would pull through, he opened his eyes and wrote in my palm with his finger, I love you. They removed his intubation and said he’d be fine in a few days. Privately, however, the neurologist explained that with such injuries, once puberty arrived, all bets were off: seizures often appeared suddenly after years of seeming inaction.

We more or less forgot the warning for a few years because Ian seemed as smart as ever. But when he had to start reading full chapters and memorizing poetry he balked. A private school that had given him a scholarship withdrew it. When he started complaining about feeling weird “blinking sensations,” we more or less ignored him: no one seemed to have heard of such things. Ian himself assumed he was just lazy and didn’t want to work so hard.

To my regret, it wasn’t until Ian turned 12 that we remembered the warning of hidden brain damage. By the time I took him to a neurologist in Washington DC, where we then lived, Ian had been suffering, it turned out, with various forms of “mini” seizures ever since his accident. Several subsequent years of trying every available medication proved no help, as the daily temporal lobe attacks increased in size and strength. The neurologist suggested a temporal lobectomy, an idea which Ian, age 15, quickly embraced. After the operation, at least for a few months, the seizures diminished in number and strength.

Barely, my brilliant son graduated from high school, and then he tried college. He could never complete a course. He switched to a local university, and that didn’t work either. Finally he got a job at a sports club and became a personal trainer, which he enjoyed and found helpful in keeping the weight off that his regimen of brain medications tended to feed. He went back to school as a photography student, immediately winning awards for his pictures. But as always, he couldn’t keep up, and within months he once more dropped out.

At that point, doctors at a renown center on the east coast suggested taking out half his withered hippocampus: maybe they could erase most of the ever increasing seizure activity. Yes, Ian might lose memory, but the undamaged part of his brain would probably compensate. Bravely, though he knew his increased weight put him at risk, my son chose the operation. “This is no way to live otherwise, Mom,” he reassured me on the phone. (I myself was recovering from brain cancer and unable to be with him.) Halfway through the surgery, the doctors had to wake him because his blood pressure rose too high. “Do you want to continue, though you will feel pain, or shall we call the procedure off?” they asked. He told them to go on. Later, when I asked if it had been uncomfortable, Ian laughed wryly and said: “It hurt like hell.”

The surgery proved difficult and had to be redone; the cost to my son was not only his appearance—plastic had to be substituted for part of his skull—but also the heavy regimen of drugs he has to take the rest of his life to ensure his seizures remain at bay. He seems to be, for the most part, rid of the daily “moments,” but the sacrifice is extraordinary: he sleeps almost 18 hours daily. And he lives in a group home for adults with brain injuries, far more intractable than his—but he too needs a home and this is the best we can find.

It’s hard to reconcile the boy who wanted to be a heart surgeon from the time he was eight with the young man today whose mental deficits cause him, within a few minutes, to leap from one idea to another. “What should I do with my life?” Ian asks me weekly, slurring his words as if inebriated, though he is drunk from his medication cocktail, not alcohol. “One step at a time,” I urge him on. But in truth, I don’t know the answer to his question. Maybe someday, somebody will.

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Laura Claridge, Ian’s mom