However severely impaired, a fractured vision was only a small part of the problems he faced. Had only his vision been affected, things would not have been too bad, but his sense of his own body had changed and, with it, his reactions:
Often I fall into a kind of stupor and don’t understand what’s going on around me; I have no sense of objects. One minute I stand there thinking about something, the next I lapse into forgetfulness. But suddenly I’ll come to, look to the right of me, and be horrified to discover half of my body is gone. I’m terrified; I try to figure out what’s become of my right arm and leg, the entire right side of my body. I move the fingers of my left hand, feel them, but can’t see the fingers of my right hand and somehow I’m not even aware they’re there. And I get terribly upset. I know there’s something I should keep in mind—that I suddenly “lose” the right side of my body because I’m always forgetting I can’t see on my right side. But I can’t get used to that idea, so often I’m terrified when part of my body disappears.
Not only would he “lose” the right side of his body (an injury to the parietal area of the left hemisphere inevitably produces this symptom); sometimes he thought parts of his body had changed—that his head had become inordinately large, his torso extremely small, and his legs displaced. It seemed to him that in addition to the disintegration of objects he perceived, parts of his body had undergone some form of fragmentation:
Sometimes when I’m sitting down I suddenly feel as though my head is the size of a table—every bit as big—while my hands, feet, and torso become very small. When I remember this, I myself think it’s comical, but also very weird. These are the kinds of things I call “bodily peculiarities.” When I close my eyes, I’m not even sure where my right leg is; for some reason I used to think (even sensed) it was somewhere above my shoulder, even above my head. And I could never recognize or understand that leg (the part from my foot to my knee).
Another annoying thing that happens (it’s a minor problem, and I have some control over it) is that sometimes, when I’m sitting on a chair, I suddenly become very tall, but my torso becomes terribly short and my head very, very tiny—no bigger than a chicken’s head. You can’t imagine what that’s like even if you tried—it’s just got to “happen” to you.
Frequently he could not locate parts of his own body. They had collapsed into bits and pieces, and he could not immediately figure out where his hand, foot, and the nape of his neck were but had to hunt long and hard for these. In his previous life, when the parts of his body had been intact, it would have been unthinkable to have to “hunt” for them.
Often, I even forget where my forearm or buttocks are and have to think of what these two words refer to. I know what the word shoulder means and that the word forearm is closely related to it [Russian: “plecho” and “predpleche”]. But I always forget where my forearm is located. Is it near my neck or my hands? The same thing happens with the word buttocks. I forget where this is, too, and get confused. Is it in my leg muscles above my knees? My pelvic muscles? The same sort of thing happens with many other parts of my body. What’s more, I still can’t remember the words for them.
Say a doctor asks me to show him where my back is. It’s strange, but I can’t do it. By now I know the word back refers to my body, but because of my head wound I can’t recall, have simply forgotten, where this part is. I’ve also forgotten a good number of other words for parts of my body.
The same thing happens when the doctor asks me to point to my eyes. It takes me a long time to remember what the word “eye” means. Finally I do, but then I have the same problem with the word nose. After the doctor has gone over this with me many times, he asks me to point these out quickly, one after the other. But this only confuses me and I no longer can remember the words nose, ear, and eye, even though he’s been training me to use them over and over again. Even a word I’ve gotten to know doesn’t come to mind quickly.
When the doctor says: “Hands on your hips!” I stand there wondering what this means. Or if he says: “Hands at your sides . . . your sides . . . hands at your sides. . . .” What does that mean?
Sometimes this confusion had rather peculiar consequences: not only would he lose a sense of his own body, he would also forget how parts of his body functioned. The following, an early recollection, dates back to the weeks right after he was wounded when he was confined to a hospital near Moscow. It is a fairly atypical symptom.
During the night I suddenly woke up and felt a kind of pressure in my stomach. Something was stirring in my stomach, but it wasn’t that I had to urinate—it was something else. But what? I just couldn’t figure it out. Meanwhile, the pressure in my stomach was getting stronger every minute. Suddenly I realized I had to go to the John but couldn’t figure out how. I knew what organ got rid of urine, but this pressure was on a different orifice, except that I’d forgotten what it was for.
This was not the only peculiar experience he had. Very soon he discovered he had to relearn what had once been so commonplace—to beckon to someone or wave good-by.
I was lying in bed and needed the nurse. How was I to get her to come over? All of a sudden I remembered you can beckon to someone and so I tried to beckon to the nurse—that is, move my left hand lightly back and forth. But she walked right on by and paid no attention to my gesturing. I realized then that I’d completely forgotten how to beckon to someone. It appeared I’d even forgotten how to gesture with my hands so that someone could understand what I meant.