Artist in Residence by Simon Bill

Author:Simon Bill [Simon Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908745583
Publisher: Sort Of Books
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

46: hemi-neglect

‘SHE’S GONE,’ said Ben. ‘Just thought you’d be interested in Charles Bonnet.’ He then pointed me towards an affable and lopsided lady patient in a wheelchair. Pauline is one of our ‘borrowed’ patients. We get them from the neurology department of the hospital downstairs to make up the numbers for when the funding people visit. I hadn’t really noticed it with Pauline’s drawings before, but she always does only one hemisphere of the brain, even when she’s supposed to be drawing the whole brain.

I gave her some of my time. ‘How are we doing today, Pauline?’ (I’m sounding more like a real doctor every day.) Pauline’s had a stroke and is now a classic ‘hemi-neglecter’. She lives in only half the world. The right half. The left half of the world just isn’t there for her. The clock goes one to six, or else all twelve numbers are compressed into the right half of the clock face. She eats half of what’s on her plate, and will only dress the right half of her body.

Ben has been encouraging her to overcome this blindness to the left of everything by trying to get her to draw both hemispheres of the brain model in front of her. He’d place it in the right half of her visual field. (Contrary to what you may have thought, or what I thought anyway, it’s not true that the left eye connects to the right hemisphere of the brain, and the right eye to the left hemisphere. It’s the left half of the visual field that connects to the right hemisphere, and vice versa. The left half of the body, however, is connected to the right half of the brain. And vice versa. Hemi-neglect of the left half of things is caused by damage in the right half of the brain. But it ought to be possible to see the left half of things if they are within the right half of the visual field. This is hard to explain without diagrams.)

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