A Brain Scientist's Insight

After a surgery to remove the hemorrhage, Jill says she had to say goodbye to her old self—the highly accomplished scientist. "We let her go. We mourned the death of who I had been. We had to do that so that here I am. If I never got my cognitive mind back, if I was never capable of thinking logically again, I could still have a life. I could still be me, but I couldn't be held to the criteria of re-achieving that," she says "And then we moved forward. And it was like: 'Who am I now? Who is going to emerge from me now?'"

Jill says she then set about learning everything all over again, staring with the ABCs. Once, when G.G. was trying to teach Jill math, they were going over "one plus one" when Jill had a question. "What's a 'one'? I had no idea what a 'one' was," Jill says.

G.G. says she never imagined that Jill would recover so amazingly. "My objective at the time was the hope that I could bring her back to be able to live independently and function in the world," she says. "All I wanted her to do was be able to do the routine things that made life independent and she wasn't going to be dependent on somebody always being there."