Rhiannon Buckley, "A Mind Blown"

 

Rhiannon Buckley is an East Midlands-based creative. Trained as an actor over 20 years ago, she has since worked professionally in theatre, education and healthcare both nationally and internationally. She is a big believer in stories of all kinds and has a passion for poetry, hip-hop, film and dog walks. 

In 2010 she survived a catastrophic brain injury which took her to the brink of death. A Mind Blown is her honest memoir of this journey and is her first book.

You can connect with Rhiannon through Instagram @rhiannonbuckleyauthor, by following her Facebook page Rhiannon Buckley Author or by visiting her website here. 

About A Mind Blown, by Rhiannon Buckley 
In a single second, everything can change. At 28, the author is thrown into a waking nightmare when an aneurysm at the centre of her brain ruptures. Initially dismissed as a migraine by the doctors, she lives ten "ordinary" days with an undiagnosed haemorrhage, her body slowly disconnecting from the world as her brain disconnects from her body. When help finally arrives she is so far gone that the hospital advises her to say goodbye. She can feel she is fading away – but what she doesn’t know is that the real work is just beginning.

Join the author on a rare and surprisingly witty adventure of survival, alongside her dying brain as it attempts to outsmart a shape-shifting bear, orders a Buddhist monk and tries to reattach to a life it once knew.

This is the remarkable story of one woman’s fight against acute neurological deterioration and her unexpected journey to find herself on the other side.

You can read more about A Mind Blown on the author's website here. Below, you can read a short extract from the memoir. 

From A Mind Blown
Steps transforming into steps are moments trapped in time. I have no concept of how far we have to go or what’ll happen once we get inside but I know this is it. It's not a feeling, or a sensation, or even a thought but something more basic stripped back and bare. I cannot keep going. Each time I return from the darkness I have less strength and so this is it. 

"Here, lean back, there's a chair behind you."

I try to pull myself away from Alex's body but I can’t hold myself up. My head scrapes across his chest and falls forward. I hear a voice and know that we must be inside the A&E department. Salt stings the back of my throat. Every second I’m upright is a second lived in flames. With Alex's arm curled around my waist, he tries again to lower me into the chair but we don’t get very far before he has to straighten up again. I’m desperate to lie down. Adding equal weight to Alex's increased efforts is my growing awareness of the futility of this situation. For the first time since we left the house, I speak. 

"Leave me here." 

And with that, I loosen my arm and let go. My legs collapse underneath me. Alex, not able to hold my weight, is bent at the middle. Half falling and half being placed, I connect with the floor and roll forwards until my cheek’s soaking up the cool coming from its surface. Alex’s feet slowly back out of my view and I’m left feeling my skin pressed into Lino and wonder how many injured footsteps came before mine.

A. J. Lees, "Neurological Birdsong"

 

Andrew Lees was born on Merseyside and is a Professor of Neurology at The National Hospital, Queen Square and University College London. He is in the top three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and included in Thomson Reuters 2015 List of the Worlds Most Scientific Minds. He has written the authorised biography of the Arsenal and Liverpool football player Ray Kennedy who developed Parkinson’s disease in his early thirties (Ray of Hope, Penguin 1994) and which was made into a television documentary, Liverpool the Hurricane Port (Random House 2011) a book about his home city, Alzheimer's: The Silent Plague (2012 Penguin) and William Richard Gowers (1845-1915) Exploring the Victorian Brain, a biography of William Gowers. His book, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions) published in 2016, explains his unlikely association with the author of Naked Lunch and his curiosity to find neurological cures. Brazil That Never Was, an investigation of saudade, was published by New York Review of Books in the USA. Lees's quest for a new viewpoint in the Amazon led to an unlikely linkage with Ciro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent and a joint presentation with him at the premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His previous book, entitled Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, was published by New York Review of Books in April 2022 and was a plea for a return to soulful compassionate medicine. Lees has also written essays published in Dublin Review of Books, Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Tears in the Fence, The New York Review of Books, The Polyphony, and the Scottish Review of Books. He is a free thinker who has dedicated his recent years to reminding the scientific community that medicine is an art and that literary and science fiction can inform understanding.

About Neurological Birdsong

In Neurological Birdsong, Dr Andrew Lees documents a career’s worth of insights into neurological practice by reformulating his most profound tweets into poetic form. The aphorisms collected here touch on a host of related topics, from the right approach to diagnosis to the importance of a "soulful neurology" in the art of healing. They will interest everyone: the suffering patient, the young doctor or nurse, the medical administrator. Neurological Birdsong is the beautiful expression of one doctor’s wisdom.

You can see more information about Neurological Birdsong here. Below, you can read a few sample aphorisms. 

From Neurological Birdsong, by A. J. Lees

Favourite Twoosh's and Twaikus

 

18. 

You cannot reduce the clinical picture

to a series of scales and tick boxes,

administered by health care professionals

who have not been taught clinical skills during their training.

54.

The medical history is part of the romance.

We must keep a patient’s life close to our souls.

Science underpins modern medicine but healing is an art.

73.

The daily practice of neurology strengthens the mind 

But it is by attending,

and in the art of healing,

that it becomes soulful,

as well as stimulating.

147.

Question everything,

dissent,

and if necessary fight back.

No blind obedience.

No e-patients.

No life-threatening rules.

Do what you know is right.

273.

Last week in the Vega

I understood that Lorca had seen,

in his torn-up garden,

the same green winds and roses of blood,

that Cajal had described,

deep in the human brain.

A. J. Lees, "Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education and his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of his books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of  a deep love for the port of Liverpool. His last book, Brazil that Never Was, described a yearning for an idealised adolescent past, in which he had dreamed of losing himself in the Amazon forest, inspired by the adventures of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. His new book is Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, published jointly by Notting Hill Editions and New York Review of Books. 

About Brainspotting:  Adventures in Neurology

This is a collection of essays explaining the making of a neurologist. An interest in bird watching as a child taught Lees the importance of observation and the need to record precisely what one sees, skills which gave him a head start when he began his training in neurology. In another chapter, he explains how the methods of crime detection used by Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes were a valuable introduction to the  diagnostic method of neurology, but in order to relieve suffering it needed to be combined with the humanity of Dr Watson. Lees believes that people can be trained to see things their mind does not yet know, and that attentive listening not only gives neurologists the diagnosis in two-thirds of cases but, like touch during the physical examination, can be a transformative healing ritual. In the last chapter, while extolling the miracle of modern neuroimaging, he warns that when used inappropriately or as a substitute for clinical training brain scanners can become weapons of mass destruction.

You can see more details about Brainspotting on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three short excerpts from the book.

 

From Brainspotting, by A. J. Lees

When I tell people I am a neurologist, very few have much idea of what I do. Common reactions are: "Isn’t that the same as Gregory House?" or "How wonderful it must be to study the human mind?" When I reply that I make the blind see, the lame walk and can calm the shaking palsy, many assume I must be a brain surgeon. The media prefer to call me a "leading neuroscientist" even though I spend no time in a laboratory and carry out no research on the healthy brain ...

My mother, who sometimes used birds to tell fortunes, conserved my bird journals for many years. After I had qualified as a doctor she handed them back to me, reminding me how as a twelve-year-old I had felt the need to name every little brown bird that came into view. She then said, "Do you remember when you found that dead blue tit unmarked in the garden and how you buried it under the laburnum marking its resting place with an ice lolly stick?" At the time she had told me that when sailors were lost at sea blue tits carried their souls to heaven ...

Soulful neurology has realistic expectations that allow me to reduce the burden of suffering through my understanding of life as well as my scientific credentials. It embraces anecdote, cordial laughter and tacit knowledge but never lapses into sentimentality. It insists that mistakes in medicine are inevitable, but when they are admitted and taken to heart  become future friends. It expects me to talk unhurriedly to my patients as if they were my close relatives and to try to be kind and nuanced when forced to give bad news. It reminds me that neurological disorders can rupture aspirations and dreams and lead to frustration, loneliness and a profound sense of hopelessness ...

A. J. Lees, "Brazil That Never Was"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education  and his research achievements  he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of Lees's books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of a deep love for the port of Liverpool.

 

About Brazil That Never Was

By  A. J. Lees

Brazil That Never Was is about my yearning for an idealised past. When my visits to the Liverpool docks with my father abruptly ended, a library book that told the story of an explorer who had  disappeared in the Mato Grosso came to the rescue. The evenings I spent reading about his vanishing  were as alive as any I can remember from my childhood and reconnected me with Brazil. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett had written in his log book: ‘The forest in these solitudes is always full of voices, the soft whisperings of those that came before.' His adventure insulated me from my first perceived failures and created an enclave of mystery beyond the scope of charts. I hoped that Fawcett could lead me to a place where there was no way out.

Even after I had become a neurologist and learned to diagnose brain injury in the street, the Brazil of my bedroom remained. In spite of  my new deductive skills and  love of material rationalism I was sometimes overcome with a dangerous sentimentality that stemmed from an indelible screen memory of Brazil. I felt as if something had gone missing and increasingly desired a fugitive moment in time that I feared would never return.

Fifty years after I had first read Exploration Fawcett, I set out on a quest to try to get answers. What I discovered was far more extraordinary than any of the wild notions put forward to explain Fawcett’s vanishing in 1925. A psychedelic encounter in the Amazon convinced me that my past had never really existed and that I could never go home.  

From Brazil That Never Was

By A. J. Lees

The Oakwood Library became my sanctuary. Its grand drawing rooms, with picture rails and sunburst stucco ceilings, were lined with hardbacked books, fresh and stale, fat and thin, large and small. I roamed the shelves, following paths that fascinated me, and taking in the scent of wisdom. The hours flashed by in minutes as I sat on the ledge of the bay window absorbing the colourful stories of the dead. Cocooned in this place, I was able to divine the Atlantic from a grain of salt. 

My father brought down a dog-eared book with soiled green cloth boards called Exploration Fawcett. It still had the remains of its dust jacket showing three men in a canoe confronting a giant snake. 'You’ll enjoy this,' he whispered with that knowing voice and quiet smile that had made him such an inspiring and popular schoolmaster. 'It’s about an explorer who vanished without trace in the Amazon' ....

In bed at night I read about Lieutenant-Colonel Fawcett, one of the very last heroic Victorian explorers who for ten years had trekked down death-filled rivers surveying stretches of disputed territory on the borders of Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. At the river port of Rurrenbaque he had watched a woman suckle a litter of pigs and at Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia he learned of new-born children being fed to swine. He wrote that one night he had been awakened by a jaguar rubbing against his back as it slunk under his hammock.

Fawcett wrote that no imagination could conjure up a vision equal to the beauty of the reality. The Mato Grosso was irresistible, with its low whistling bird song and gorgeous butterflies. The monochrome photographs in the book depicted a lost world but one that felt intensely familiar. A sketch of a drowning man being eaten by piranhas at the beginning of one chapter emphasised the dangers, while the line drawings of ruins and hieroglyphs raised my expectations of an El Dorado.