Living with brain cancer from the inside.

Reading with Brain Damage

The first book I read after brain surgery was Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood.  You don’t know me well enough to understand how incongruous that is.  I read cyberpunk, travelogues, dark mystery novels, and math journals.  Not romance novels with a science bent.  

But here’s the thing.  Hazelwood writes clearly.  There are only a few characters to keep track of and they are easy to understand.  It was a gift to enjoy a book that was simply fun.  You sort of know what’s going to happen.  The author is taking you along for a ride and you know the destination but not how to get there.  And everything works out in the end.  Now that’s messaging I can get into.  

Sadly, the physical act of reading wasn’t easy at all.  I used an electronic book so that I could keep changing the font size and typeface.  Mostly I read with black letters on a cream background but sometimes I reversed it to white letters on a dark gray page.  

And I often had to reread whole paragraphs because I would confuse the end of one line with the beginning of some other line.  Patiently, I reassembled these disparate lines in my head until I could follow the text correctly.  Sometimes it took forever and my head hurt.  But I kept at it. Basically, I re-learned reading with Ali Hazelwood and for that I am eternally grateful.  

Postscript.  Still can’t read math journals.  But neuro-damage can take years to heal if it heals at all. If it ends up being romance novels for life, I’ll take it. 


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