My family was told I may not survive a brain injury. The guitar helped me recover

CBC Radio Specials51:19Against the Odds

This First Person article is the experience of Allan Boss, a CBC producer who lives in Okotoks, Alta. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Before the first hospital came the rolling of the Toyota Land Cruiser and my body being thrown into the ditch with a thud. I sustained a traumatic brain injury. I was 24. Doctors told my family I could die. If I recovered, they said, it would likely be at about a six-year-old's level of development. 

In the first two hospitals — one in Enderby, B.C., where the accident happened and next a better facility about 100 kilometres away in Kamloops — I spent about seven days comatose. I was a lump of flesh kept alive by machines, surrounded by tubes and buzzing and whirring and blinking lights. 

There was also the austere absence of time. I don't remember anything.

After Kamloops came the air ambulance flight to Edmonton, near where my parents lived. I don't remember the trip and I only remember fragments of the next month spent in the third hospital. A pill bottle here, a blue hospital sheet there. A face, though I'm not sure whose. I don't remember visitors.

These flashes are like curtains on a window opening for a second or two and revealing something: a sepia watercolour landscape on a blank wall, a dimly lit and abandoned nurse's station, a stainless steel bathtub in a tiled room, and the drip, drip, drip of shiny droplets weeping from the faucet into warm bath water. 

After a month I was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital. Number four. I spent a couple of weeks there as an in-patient learning to walk better and trying to lessen a prominent limp. Gaining spatial awareness and rediscovering how objects functioned in space — catching a ball, for example. Speaking, writing, and redeveloping fine motor skills. A favourite activity was sewing a fuzzy, stuffed penguin. The rest of these days were filled with tests and therapy sessions.

No one has ever told me when I came out of coma, because it's not a light switch kind of thing. Coma is secretive, ambiguous, a state that defies strict measure. It's a long unconsciousness, then moments in it and moments out of it. Over time, the moments of coma became shorter. This state of shifting consciousness or awareness is known as post-traumatic amnesia. I had that for around four years.

The memories became longer in the rehab hospital but they are still sparse and somewhat dubious. For example, I remember eating dinner in a light-filled room with the other head injury patients, none of us talking but someone humming tunelessly. I remember my bed in the middle of a dormitory filled with other beds.

The space was silent and empty, although it couldn't have been — there were too many other patients — so maybe it's the way I've built the memory? Maybe I wasn't as aware as I think I was?

I don't really remember this either, but I've constructed a sequence of events in my mind: seeing the black guitar case on the floor; lifting it; placing it on the bed; unbuckling the latches; opening the lid.

I began playing guitar when I was 10. I took lessons for a bit, learning how to position my hands and to play some major and minor chords and a few songs. But my teacher quit. The lessons ended. Still, I enjoyed my steel-string, dreadnought acoustic enough to play most days.

As a teen, I learned Black Sabbath songs like Iron Man and Paranoid, playing them with easy, raw, power chords. I loved Iron Maiden, but the dual guitar riffs, speed picking and bass lines from songs like Rime of the Ancient Mariner made me feel as though my fingers were as immovable as fence posts. 

Before the brain injury, I'd been playing regularly and knew a dozen or more folk songs — Dylan, Lightfoot, Indigo Girls — that I preferred to heavy metal as I got older. When I pulled out the guitar in the hospital, I expected them to come easily. I placed the instrument on my lap and my left hand's fingers on the strings in the shape of a D-major chord.

Then I tried to pluck some notes with my right hand, but I couldn't. My fingers didn't respond. I couldn't even strum because my right side was paralyzed, a state known as hemiparesis. 

It made me feel like a toddler, unable to do something that was easy before my brain injury. It felt as though I needed to relearn everything.

Some time later my doctor asked, "Do you have any problems?" 

"I can't play guitar," I said.

"Well," she responded, "base your recovery on your guitar."

I went back to the dorm, took out the instrument and played. The notes were imprecise, muddled, dissonant. But still, I played and played and played, hour after hour, day after day. This was another reason I recovered as well as I did: resilience and grit. I just wouldn't or couldn't stop. I had to beat this injury.

Fast-forward 30 years or so and know that I recovered beyond expectations. I'm sure that music and guitar were a big part of why my brain healed as well as it did. As I've learned, music enhances neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to adapt and change due to training and experience. 

Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music wrote, "Through studies of people with brain damage, we've seen patients who have lost the ability to read a newspaper but can still read music, or individuals who can play the piano but lack the motor co-ordination to button their own sweater."

Playing an instrument uses every region and subsystem of the brain, he says, and can aid recovery from brain injury.

In May, I hosted an open mic in our local theatre. I played Leonard Cohen's Bird on a Wire, plus a couple songs that I wrote. I'm not a pro, but I'm a decent amateur and the guitar still makes me want to live. I play nearly every day and believe the six-string is part of who I am. 

When I think back to that moment in the hospital when I couldn't play, it seems unreal, hard to even imagine. I'm reminded of how large a role music has played in my life and recovery — and how that has made all the difference.

Do you have a similar experience to this First Person column? We want to hear from you. Write to us at firstperson@cbc.ca.