A New Life With My New Brain

After Lotje Sodderland had a stroke at 34, she couldn’t speak, read or even think. Over time she’s worked to rehabilitate her brain and accept what happened to her – making her insights into the mysterious questions of how we think and who we are all the more revealing

- Sally Williams

RIGHT from the start it’s clear this is no ordinary video selfie – the young woman staring into the camera looks vulnerable and scared. You can’t see her head at all, only her face peering from a hoodie she wears to hide her partly shaved scalp and bloody scar – a grizzly reminder of the emergency brain operation she’s just undergone. “Okay, I’m alive,” she says haltingly. “I’m not dead. That’s a start.”

After suffering a life-threatening stroke at age 34, Lotje Sodderland awoke in a London hospital feeling like she’d landed on a different planet. Just a few days earlier she’d been a producer with an advertising agency, full of life and energy, always on the move. But unbeknown to her, she’d been born with a tangle of abnormal blood vessels in her brain. One night in November 2011, for no obvious reason, it ruptured.

By keeping her in a medically induced coma for two days and performing surgery on her parietal and temporal lobes – the parts of the brain housing language and perception – doctors were able to save her life.

But they weren’t able to do anything to reverse the catastrophic damage caused by the haemorrhage. She awoke to a world she didn’t recognise.

“Colours were much more vibrant and sounds were louder,” she now recalls.

“I couldn’t speak at first, or read, and my thoughts weren’t linear or logical. I knew who I was, and I recognised my mother and brother – but I didn’t know anything else.”