Recovering schema after brain surgery

My best friend T was diagnosed with epilepsy, a brain disorder characterized by sudden recurring attacks of loss of consciousness or convulsive seizures, when she was 7-years-old. I’ve known T since birth because our mothers were also close friends. She learned how to read by age 3, went on to the mentally gifted program in school and was always very smart. T had her first big seizure at age 7 (the end of Piaget’s second state of development), a few weeks before we were going to perform in a ballet recital. One night, when her mom went to check on her after she fell asleep, she found T in bed shaking and chattering her teeth until a large portion of them fell out. Normally after a seizure patients experience what is called a post-ictal period, where they slowly return to normal awareness. After a month of hospitalization, she had to re-learn how to walk. She also seemed to have a different personality, she became more child-like – using shorter sentences and simpler words, and had difficulty expressing herself in words, but after a few months she slowly returned to her pre-seizure personality. Piaget said that the biggest achievement at this second stage of development is representing the world symbolically, especially through language.

Throughout our teenage years, T took medicine to control her seizures but would still get them if she got over-stimulated because of stress, fun, fireworks, loud music or alcohol, for example. After graduating college and working for a year, T decided to get brain surgery to stop having seizures or taking medicine to control them. If the operation and recovery happened successfully, she would be able to do things such as operate a car or have the option of having children. The doctors had to remove a chunk of her brain above the left temporal lobe, which is close to the “language center”, and warned her that her speech might be disabled as a result of the surgery. She decided to take the chance.

Following the surgery in January of 2005, T went to therapy and had to re-learn how to read. But the surgery didn’t push her back all the way to the first stage of development, because T was still able to recognize letters, people and speech. Having a keen interest in politics, she started by reading short passages in the Metro, a free newspaper that contains short summaries of local, national and international events written at an elementary reading-level. The doctor said it helped her recovery because she was bilingual, and bilingual patients have a more developed language center.

As you can see, I’ve known T all my life and have seen her develop according to Piaget’s stages of development. I’ve also seen her regress after seizures and quickly return to her previous stage.

A year and a half after brain surgery, she is in graduate school and although she is able to comprehend the material, she feels frustrated at times because she is not at the stage of development that she was pre-surgery. She needs to study and read differently and re-read more than she had to in the past. Piaget would say that T is adjusting to her environment post-surgery, and creating new schemata to learn all the new vocabulary one needs to when studying Educational Policy. When I asked her how school was going, she wrote in an email,

“I think the hardest part for me is not what I have to do to remember things now but that I never had to do it before. Its basically having to change the way I learn and get used to it. I'm doing the highlighting and all that but remembering it well enough to be able to discuss it in class is different. Hopefully, I'll get used to it.”