Where Is the Mango Princess?
by Cathy Crimmins
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cathy CrimminsEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-19
ISBN: 0375404910
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Where Is the Mango Princess?
Book Review: Amazing Crimmins
Summary: 5 Stars
Everything about this book has been said in prior reviews. I admire Crimmins for her courage and positive outlook. I would like to know how the tale proceeds, how is her husband now, after the first year of rehabilitaion has passed. My then seven-year old daughter suffered brain trauma through disease, equine encephalitis rampant in Mexico when we visited there in 1970. After seizures, a cardiac arrest, a six week coma, and the long road to recovery began. I kept a journal and wrote about the illness and the eventual break-up of our family. This head-injury infected the family like a virus, causing the fabric of our structure to weaken, eventually to break. Later, much later, after having been married to a young man who had also suffered TBI through riding sans helmet on a motorcycle, and having lived a rewarding life, the old scars in my daughter's brain led to a violent seizure, and death. Unexpected and sudden. I read recently of a young woman who suffered TBI and lay in a coma. My impulse was to go to her mother and try to give her hope, from experience. I didn't, simply because I feared the question, "How is your daughter now?" And having to answer, "She died," hardly encouraging, since the death was related to the earlier brain-injury. There are no pat answers in a brain injury. Every case is unique. I could see how different the trauma was in my son-in-law, who was injured (motorcycle accident) when nineteen, and with little more than an average education. He fared less well than Cathy's husband with a higher education. Methods used today are much better than those used even fifteen years ago, and much advanced over those used thirty years ago. Age has something to do with it as well. Stephanie was seven, at an age when the brain could still form new synapses. All these factors come into play making each and every case different. Stephanie's neurologist told me, when he read the memoir I had written of Stephanie, "Mrs. Finell, when I read how Stephanie was treated thirty years ago, I feel neurology was still in the dark ages. Everything we know now we have learned within the last ten to fifteen years." That is why I would hesitate to recommend this book to family members of anyone who has "only yesterday" suffered TBI. The truth might be too frightening. On the other hand, it should be read by every doctor, caregiver, HMO person, and after a certain while has passed, then, by every member of the family. It should be read by co-workers, or co-students of the TBI person. No one understands TBI. Just yesterday I read an article again, where a teenager is lying comatose after having been hit by a car, accompanied by photos of schoolmates with balloons, with smiling get-well faces, innocently believing that after a while the stricken person will awaken from her coma and after a given recovery time, everything will be as it was. The sad news is, and this Crimmins drives home over and over again, that it will never be again as it once was. The old clichee holds: Ignorance is bliss. Optimism and hope carry the day. Some of the doctor's predictions come true, some do not. It would take courage for someone to read the book had a recent TBI occurred to a family member. I am amazed that Cathy Crimmins could write this book while her husband was recovering, I suppose it served to keep her sane and was in a way cathartic. My hat is off to this wonderful writer, this "Amazing Crimmins," never maudlin, always matter of fact, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always straight on target. One last word: This book is invaluable for what it teaches us about the brain. And yes, it reads like a novel and therefore will be read. Other books dealing with brain injury written by doctors, offer valuable information but will not be read by the lay reader, and this is a story that HAD to be told to Everyman.
Summary of Where Is the Mango Princess?
This is a book that Cathy Crimmins never hoped to write: the story of how a tragic accident nearly destroyed her family; of how in a split second their lives were changed forever.In 1996, Cathy Crimmins, her husband, Alan, and their daughter, Kelly, were on an idyllic lakeside holiday when a boating accident left Alan in a deep coma, with severe damage to the frontal lobes of his brain, the area that controls speech, memory, movement, and personality. Where Is the Mango Princess? is the story of what happened to Cathy and her family after Alan woke up.
From the frustrations of dealing with doctors ("The first doctor, whom we call Dr. Asshole, swooped down from the great Neurosurgery in the Sky to tell me he has nothing to tell me") and insurance plans ("You know what our HMO's brain surgery plan is? They give your wife a Black & Decker drill and an instruction booklet") to the enigmas of personality, mortality, and modern science, Where Is the Mango Princess? is a chronicle of an unforgettable transformation.
Crimmins's story is full of unexpected and hard-won wisdom: a reminder of the precariousness of health, of fortune, of life itself; an indictment of HMOs and the bureaucrats bred by them; a lesson in how resilient love is, and how wide its compass. Most of all, though, it is Cathy's ability to confront absurdity head-on and not be undone by it that awes and inspires us, in what may be the most miraculous, the most healing, the most uniquely human trait of all--the gift of wit, and how it held her together in the face of the worst life has to offer.
Writing with grace, candor, and remarkable clarity, Cathy Crimmins charts her husband's painful and often astonishing journey through the world of the brain-injured and takes readers on a voyage--life-affirming in even its darkest moments--through neurology, identity, and the mysteries of the human brain.
"Alan's brain got run over by a speedboat," Cathy Crimmins writes. "That last sentence reads like a bad country-western song lyric, but it's true. It was a silly, horrible, stupid accident." And so begins the harrowing tale of a family vacation gone awry when a speedboat collides with her husband's small craft, changing their lives forever. Crimmins (The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People and When My Parents Were My Age They Were Old... or Who Are You Calling Middle-Aged?) is used to writing with wit, self-effacing humor, and a warmth that can bring readers to their knees--or at least to tears of laughter. But in this stunning memoir about her husband's brain injury and the subsequent fallout, Crimmins has outdone herself, bringing all her sharply honed narrative skills into play as she tackles the life-wrenching drama of witnessing her husband's near death and ensuing rebirth as a very different person.
Crimmins takes readers inside the drama with all the right details and interior feelings to keep us fully mesmerized: her 7-year-old daughter's ashen face, her husband's twitching body, the paramedic's alarming question, "Is your husband one of these people that ordinarily has large pupils?" As deftly as she takes readers inside this personal story of not-quite recovery--more like discovery--she is also able to pan back and show readers the comedic silver lining (the self-important doctors, the moments of mishaps, and of course, the whereabouts of the mysterious Mango Princess) that lies within the cloud of her family's tragedy. Anyone who has endured a head trauma or loved someone who has will be engrossed by this wise and knowledgeable storyteller. The rest of us will have a captivating lesson about the rejuvenation of the brain as well as the human heart. --Gail Hudson
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