I had a baby – then lost my memory, part 2

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Listen wherever you get your BBC podcast. I remember going through the manuscript that I had written, page after page after page after page, and I had no memory that I'd written them. It was like pulling a book from my bookshelf

that someone else had written. And I was so deeply frightened that I just deleted the manuscript. And then I came back to the computer

and my fingers were going on the typewriter. I was typing words. Everything was making sense in my brain. But the next day I would reread what I had written

and it was sheer gibberish. sentences made absolutely no sense. It was haunting to think that my brain was betraying me so deeply. That's Samina Ali, describing what is probably every novelist's worst nightmare, losing

the ability to write. And this isn't about having a bad day at the computer or getting writer's block, but overnight, your imagination, your capacity for language is completely gone. And that's just one element of Samina's experience. I'm Masya Fuchs.

You're listening to Lives Less Ordinary from the BBC World Service. This is part two of Samina's story. If you haven't heard part one, we'd recommend going back an episode and listening, but you can also follow along from here.

Samina was born in Hyderabad, India, to a Muslim family who moved to the US in the 1970s. Her parents were pretty traditional, but in her early 20s, Samina started to carve her own path. She left an unhappy arranged marriage, and fell in love with and married a fellow writer

named Scott. She was living the life she dreamed of, going to artsy suare's and hanging out with intellectuals, writing her first novel, Building a Home in California. And when Samina got pregnant, she and Scott were thrilled.

They could never have anticipated the devastation that followed. Every time I had a contraction, the nurse would have to wake me up and say, push. And I remember being like, why am I pushing? What am I doing?

Where am I? I was completely disoriented. My brain wasn't working. On the day Samina gave birth in 1999, an undiagnosed and rare form of the pregnancy disorder pre-eclampsia

left her with multiple organ failure and catastrophic brain damage. Her condition was so dire that a neurologist nicknamed her Miracle Girl when she emerged from a coma after five days. But when Samina woke up, she had no memory of her husband, of her son, of who she

was. Semina was 29 years old, but much like her newborn son Ishmael, she would be starting life from scratch. Only able to recognize her parents and brothers

and communicate in Urdu, her first language, Semina and her baby went back home after weeks in hospital. Her body was slowly healing.

English was coming back to her haltingly, but her mind was still in fragments. Her husband, Scott, still a stranger. So Mina would have to learn how to be herself all over again.

When I was being discharged, my neurologist said, just like a puzzle, the fully functioning brain has all of the pieces put together and you can see the overall image of that puzzle.

But that all of the pieces in my brain had broken, you know, everything was shattered and broken. And it was my job from then on to try to put together as many pieces of the puzzle as possible. And you don't realize how difficult that process is. You don't realize the first time around how difficult it is to stand up and walk.

You don't realize how difficult it is to acquire speech. You don't realize how difficult it is to begin understanding the world around you. You know, I really was like a child. It was deeply frightening.

You know, you've got to start putting your mind and your life back together. What sorts of things are you relearning? So when a person recovers from brain damage, they're not remembering functions. I wasn't remembering how to be coordinated when I'm walking, how to use the English language,

how to remember to have short-term memory again. I wasn't remembering those things. I was literally relearning those things. So in the beginning,

my recovery really meant that I was very similar to my newborn. Our milestones in the beginning days were very similar. I was doing exactly what my son was doing.

So he as a newborn was learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to understand the world. and I was, you know, at 29, 30 years old, I was relearning those very functions.

And so he was sleeping long hours, I was sleeping long hours. He would wake up to, you know, have his diaper changed and to nurse and then he would go back to sleep.

And I would wake up, take my medications and you know, someone would help me to the restroom and then I would go back to sleep. And at a certain point, my brain picked up on the similarity that there was someone else

in the house that was on the same bio-rhythms as me. And it's an interesting thing because often we think that women are just born with maternal instincts or that as soon as a child is born, a woman becomes a mother. And for me it was the opposite.

The fact that he and I shared the same biorethms really angered me. My mom had stayed in order to help take care of our son and Scott had to go back to teach. And my mom was caring for my son and me. And I remember that if I woke up and I needed my medications or I needed to use the restroom

and she couldn't come to me because she would say, oh, I'm nursing Ishmael or I'm changing his diaper or whatever it was. I remember how furious, furious I would become. And when you don't have your higher functioning of the brain, when you're not in the thinking