Imagine what it would be like to one day wake up and find that you were suddenly both blind and completely paralysed. This is what happened to Patient H69. Her condition is unique. It has no name.
Over the course of the next six months, Patient H69 slowly recovered her eyesight. Opening her eyes onto a watery, two-dimensional landscape, Patient H69 saw an unrecognisably monochromatic world. As colour reappeared, she encountered a range of bizarre phenomena, from synaesthesia to discussions with inanimate objects - all part of her brain's response to suddenly losing two sense. And in the process, she became a one-woman experimental subject, as a multidisciplinary team of neurobiologists, psychologists, immunologists and developmental biologists tried to work out what had happened to her, and what incredible things could be learnt from her miraculous recovery.
This mesmerising account tells the story of Patient H69 in her own words, based on the detailed audio-diaries she kept during her time of blindness and over the course of the two years of scientific research that was to follow. It provides a unique story - of terror and torment in the beginning, moving on to scientific discovery, some pretty weird neurobiology, the brilliance of the NHS and a woman battling against all odds to make the best of a unique situation, turning herself into a science sleuth to uncover the mechanics of her own brain, and learning meditation and self-hypnosis tools to endure the ordeal.
Embraced and supported by neuroscientists along the way, Patient H69 learned about some of the hidden, innermost functions of the brain and our complex visual system, while her own case study offered scientists an important, and previously inaccessible window into the process of early visual development, as her own optic nerves self-repaired and her brain went into overdrive.
This is a gripping human story, made all the more real by the unique response of one patient and the science she uncovers.
