Bechtel 1 Max Bechtel Ms.

Gardner Honors English, Period 2 24 January 2014 Locked in a White Room Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex The spider web of the human body, delicate, hypersensitive, connects numerous things, and responds instantly to outside events. The Cerebrum, home to an estimated 80 to 120 neurons, is the center of the human nervous system. Even from an infantile age, our brains perform miraculous tasks: allowing for us to breathe, eat, sleep, see, hear, smell, make sounds, feel sensations, and even recognize the people close to them. Being the ever-pondering six-yearold, many questions arose from my boggled mind as soon as I heard about this complicating vital organ. The rumors I heard throughout my elementary years didnt help suppress my questions, but only formed countless more. Is my brain gray? Do you get new brain wrinkles when you learn something new?? Do we only use ten percent of our brain??? With such queries bouncing around in my brain, I resorted to my final line of defense, the only source I could truly trust, the people who originally told me where babies came from (even though only now do I realize that they were lying to me, and that storks actually dont deliver babies), my parents. I proceeded to bombard them with the same questions rattling around in my noggin, rendering them stunned and blank-faced. Thankfully my youthful naivety didnt let me see that they did not know all the answers to all my questions, yet I was still left with the commonly told escape statement: you will learn

Bechtel 2 later in school. I ended up learning about my brain in depths that werent common for a sixyear-old, however it wasnt in school that I earned this knowledge; nor did I learn much from Steve Martins movie, The Man with Two Brains, which I watched for a while on television, intrigued by the title. It was summer vacation, after a long year of first grade, and I was riding my new bike, a Hot Wheels 16 Dynacraft REV BMX bike, at my moms goddaughters familys house. I was not new to the concept of no training wheels; in fact I was so familiar with riding with only the two wheels that I assumed I was a master bike-rider. Obviously, I was not, but I continued anyways - slaloming my way in and out of the reflectors in the middle of the street. Coincidentally, I took a tumble that ending up teaching me more than I hoped to learn about my cerebrum. The fall off my bike gave me a serious concussion and a lump on my forehead making me easily mistakable for a unicorn. Apparently, I had worn my helmet too far back in my head, and my forehead was easily exposed. Hitting fifty-five miles per hour on a forty-five limit street, we sped to the hospital, where my parents rushed me in to the ER, and where I learned that my brain was bleeding. You have Subdural Haematoma. My mom told me as I tried to understand the severity of my conditions. Seeing that I had no idea what that meant, she continued to explain painfully what this meant, It is a collection of clotting blood, and if your head doesn't make an immediate recover, which the doctor says it sometimes does, you will have to get operated on to remove the clots. She then reassured me that the doctor said I should heal well as long as nothing should happen to the same spot on my forehead. I was confident that nothing would happen, given that out of the six years of my life, I had only had an incident like this once.

Bechtel 3 When I got back home from the hospital, three days after my accident, I spent a lot of my time trying to learn as much about my brain, and brains in general, in hopes of keeping myself safe. Being only six, my resources were limited, but there was always the vast arsenal of information located at the click of a button on my parents computer. I ended up understanding less than half of what I read, and becoming twice as intent on learning about what happened. Unfortunately, Ive got the worst luck in the world (as I like to believe). Two weeks after I got home, I got another concussion, when I hit my head in the same spot. I dont remember what happened in the house that day, nothing except for sound of the engine of the car and feeling of the gravel barely bouncing the car on our speedy expedition. In retrospect, it is interesting how in the chaotic environment and the traumatic situation of my brain, I went back to those capabilities of feeling and hearing my mind enabled for my body ever since I was born. I was told that I got in a fight with my brother and I somehow slipped and hit my head on the tile in our upstairs bathroom, and given the last warning from the doctors, my family was worried sick. I was once again rushed into the hospital where I was placed in a donut-shaped machine for the second time that month. I didnt know at the time that this simple-looking machine actually provided a very detailed, multidimensional view of my bodys interior, and I was genuinely scared. The doctor once again told my mom, who relayed the information to me, that my brain was crucially injured, and I had to stay the day here so they could run tests on me. Tired, dazed, and confused, I didnt put up a struggle when they put me in a bed and began to ask me a bundle of questions of how I was feeling. Locked in a white room, afraid of the door opening and bad news walking in. Locked in a white room, afraid that my brain wont stop bleeding, wont recover. Locked in a white room,

Bechtel 4 afraid of the pending questions, the pending diagnostics. Locked in a white room, afraid things will never be the same. You have been through a lot this past couple of weeks, I remember the doctor kindly saying. He was the stereotypical doctor, white shirt, glasses, neatly combed hair, and a soothing voice. He continued to tell me of my situation, and the great recovery progress my brain and cranium were making. After a long talk consisting of all the answers to what I thought I wanted to know, he told me that I was free to go home. Even though I had gotten all of my answers, there was a part of me that didnt want to know all of the damage that had been done, and go back to being innocent. For a while, what I learned about my incident frightened me. When I got home and tried to ride my bike again, I was mentally incapable of riding my bike down the driveway, fear was locked in my head, just as I was in the white room. However once I walked my bike down the driveway, I could ride just fine on the flat, newly paved gravel that lined the streets outside my house. It was only until just over four years ago, when I was eleven when I was finally able to ride comfortably down my driveway. The brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body, and I will never know the answers to all the questions I had when I was six, and still have now. With every breath I take, food I taste, night I sleep, sight I see, sound I hear, scent I smell, feeling I sense, I will learn more about myself and Cerebrum, possibly even gaining new wrinkles for my brain.

Bechtel 5 Works Cited "Dynacraft Hot Wheels 14 Inch Rev BMX Bike Boys." Cool Bike Games RSS. Hot Wheels, 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. Freeman, Shanna. "Top 10 Myths About the Brain." HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks.com, 17 Sept. 2008. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. The Man with Two Brains. Dir. Carl Reiner. By Carl Reiner, Steve Martin, and George Gipe. Perf. Steve Martin, Kathleen Turner, and David Warner. Warner Bros., 1983. Television.