SECOND OF TWO PARTS
Her mind refused to cooperate.
And, at times, that was a good thing.
Lynn-Holly Johnson, the star of "Ice Castles" and a Bond girl in "For Your Eyes Only," had a stroke in 2010. Luckily, she retained her ability to walk and talk. But for three years, she has struggled to reclaim her brain.
She lost a lot during that fight. For example, she has very little memory of her father's death. He died of pancreatic cancer just a few months after her stroke. ("I guess God didn't want me to see my Dad falling apart," she said. "I remember his smile.")
She had surgery to close the hole in her heart, which is called the patent foramen ovale, or PFO, and appears in 25 percent of the population. Her father, before he fought cancer, suffered a stroke as a result of his PFO. And she was sure her brother, Gregg, had it too, though he didn't want to get tested. But Johnson's PFO was no longer her biggest problem.
She would start a sentence but couldn't finish it. Or she would blurt words out of context. "Rice and beans," she remembers saying to no one in particular. She would be given a minute to name as many animals as she could; she could come up with four.
In those early days, she could stay awake for only three hours at a time. Once, about a month after the stroke, a vacuum cleaner salesman came to her door and she bought one for $2,600. She doesn't know why she did it.
She would be asked to spell a word backward, and she couldn't figure out why someone would need a word spelled backward. So she didn't answer. She would get lost inside the hospital. She would forget where she was. She would be shown a page full of numbers, "and they looked like worms on a page." She had a bracelet made to commemorate her stroke, and she got the date wrong.
She grew depressed; angry. She thought her mind was gone for good.
In Hoag Hospital's Acquired Brain Injury Program, Johnson made a list of her goals: "Step 1 – take naps. Step 2 – rest between assignments. Step 3 – take baby steps. Step 4 – prevent emotional fall-apart."
"My brain just wanted to go to sleep," Johnson said. "That's what it needed to recover."
Then, with more than a year of therapy at Hoag, her mind started coming back. She worked puzzles and started figuring them out. She walked to unfamiliar parts of a building and found her way back.