American Lives: A Reader

A Measure of Acceptance

floyd skloot A Measure of Acceptance In the Shadow of Memory 231 T he psychiatrist’s office was in a run-down industrial section at the northern edge of Oregon’s capital, Salem. It shared space with a chiropractic health center, separated from it by a temporary divider that wobbled in the current created by opening the door. When I arrived, a man sitting with his gaze trained on the spot I suddenly filled began kneading his left knee, his suit pants hopelessly wrinkled in that one spot. Another man, standing beside the door and dressed in overalls, studied the empty wall and muttered as he slowly rose on his toes and sank back on his heels. Like me, neither seemed happy to be visiting Dr. Peter Avilov. Dr. Avilov specialized in the psychodiagnostic examination of disability claimants for the Social Security Administration. He made a career of weeding out hypochondriacs, malingerers, fakers, people who were ill without organic causes. There may be many such scam artists working the disability angle, but there are also many legitimate claimants. Avilov worked as a kind of hired gun, paid by an agency whose financial interests were best served when he determined that claimants were not disabled. This arrangement was like having your house appraised by the father-in-law of your prospective buyer, like being stopped by a traffic cop several tickets shy of his monthly quota, like facing a part-time judge who works for the construction company you’re suing. Avilov’s incentives were not encouraging to me. I understood why I was there. When the Social Security Administration had decided to reevaluate my medical condition, eight years after originally approving my claim of disability, it exercised the right to send me to a doctor of its own choosing. 232 floyd skloot This seemed fair enough. But after receiving records, test results, and reports of brain scans, and statements from my own internal medicine and infectious diseases physicians, all attesting to my ongoing disability, and after requiring twenty-five pages of handwritten questionnaires from me and my wife, scheduled an appointment for me with Avilov. Not with an independent internal medicine or infectious diseases specialist, not with a neurologist, but with a shrink. Now, twelve years after first getting sick, I can say that I’ve become adept at being brain damaged. It’s not that my symptoms have gone away: I still try to dice a stalk of celery with a carrot instead of a knife, reverse p and b when I write, or draw a primitive hourglass when I mean to draw a star. I place newly purchased packages of frozen corn in the dishwasher instead of the freezer; after putting crumpled newspaper and dry pine into our woodstove, I strike a match and attempt to light the metal door. Preparing to cross the “main street” in Carlton, Oregon, I looked both ways, saw a pickup truck a quarter-mile south, took one step off the curb, and landed flat on my face, cane pointing due east. So I’m still much as I was in December 1988. Along the way, though, I learned to manage my encounters with the world in new ways. Expecting the unexpected now, I can, like an improvisational actor, incorporate it into my performance. For instance, my tendency to use words that are close to—but not exactly—the words I’m trying to say has led to some surprising discoveries in the composition of sentences. A freshness emerges when the mind is unshackled from its habitual ways. In the past, I never would have described the effect of that viral attack on my brain as being “geezered” overnight if I hadn’t first confused the words seizure and geezer. It is as though my word-finding capacity has developed a buckshot associative function to compensate for its A Measure of Acceptance 233 failures of precision, so I end up with shellac instead of plaque when trying to describe the gunk on my teeth. Who knows, maybe James Joyce was brain damaged when he wrote Finnegans Wake and built a whole novel on puns and neologisms that were actually symptoms of disease. It’s possible to see such domination of the unexpected in a positive light. So getting lost in the familiar woods around our house and finding my...