ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at the Hidden Brain podcast. "My Unsung Hero" tells the stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. Today's story comes from Rebecca Simonitsch. At 15, Simonitsch developed epilepsy. She started having brief seizures that affected her speech. Over the next five years, she cycled through medications, but the seizures continued. When she was 20, she flew from Charleston to Baltimore to meet with a neurologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He told her she was a candidate for brain surgery, which could remove the scarred brain tissue causing her symptoms. On the flight home, Simonitsch kept replaying what the doctor had told her.
REBECCA SIMONITSCH: And like so many patients who receive difficult or big news, I had really only absorbed 10- to 15% of the conversation, and now I had so many questions. So I just recall being on the plane, looking out the window and feeling so many emotions in that moment. So the plane took flight, and then I made eye contact with the gentleman sitting beside me. And he must have asked me something along the lines of what was I doing in Baltimore. And to my surprise, being a fairly private person, I blurted out something along the lines of, I just found out I have to have brain surgery. And I remember saying it quietly. You know, it was kind of - I was practicing saying it out loud that first time I said it to him. And he turned to look at me, and he shared with me that he was a neuropsychologist, and he had worked with patients like me.
And he asked me questions. He listened to me. He began asking me what I had learned at Johns Hopkins, what they had shared with me about the surgery. And then he clarified what some of those statements meant. And I'll just never forget the way he smiled at me and very calmly, he leaned forward, pulled out a backpack or a briefcase, and brought out a notebook. And he had some really old-school, graph-like paper that he put on the airplane table. And he pulled out a pen, and then he just started drawing pictures of the brain and even marking sections of his drawing as he spoke and pointing out key details of where the hippocampus was and the amygdala, and this is what they would do with the surgery and how they would remove that scarred region.
I didn't understand the complexity of the brain and what this meant in terms of surgery. So the gift of having someone sit beside me, who was a compassionate listener and could speak to me at my level - I work in healthcare now - that is infrequent. That doesn't happen often. And so I had this gift of this wonderful stranger with this expertise and compassion sitting next to me that day on the plane and explaining it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALSEVER LAKE'S "CHETOWALK SOUND")
FLORIDO: Rebecca Simonitsch lives in Santa Barbara, California. She still has that piece of paper, and she is now seizure-free. You can find more stories of unsung heroes and learn how to submit your own at hiddenbrain.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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