“This face thingy’s only for human faces, right?”
At that, she paused. “Mostly,” she said, “yes.”
“Mostly?” I asked. “What does mostly mean?”
“There’s not a lot of research on animal faces. There has been some research on cars, though.”
“Cars?”
“Some people with this condition have trouble recognizing their cars. They can also have trouble with direction. But it hasn’t been studied enough to understand why or how.”
“So…” Somehow this felt like the worst news of all. “You can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to see my dog’s face?”
But she wasn’t going to let me descend into self-pity. “Guarantees are overrated.”
I must have been spoiling for a fight. “Guarantees are underrated.”
But she didn’t take the bait. “Let’s just take one question at a time.”
* * *
DR. NICOLE HAD queued up some facial recognition tests for me to take to see how bad it was. “This’ll give us a baseline,” she said.
The tests—the Glasgow Face Matching Test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, along with a few others—were all online. She rotated the laptop toward me.
I folded my legs and geared up to begin. I was usually pretty good at tests. But I would not be acing these.
These tests were hard. Like if you made a kindergartner take the SAT.
Some of them asked you to look at two pictures and decide if they were the same person or a different person. Some of them asked you to study a set of faces and then find those people later in groups. Some of them showed you famous people with their hair removed. They specifically did not ask if you could name the person—because recalling names is a different brain system. They asked only if you could recognize them.
Could I recognize them?
I could not.
It was all—and I mean this in the fullest sense of the word—nonsense.
From celebrities to presidents to pop icons to Oscar winners, all the faces in all the tests looked totally indistinguishable. I couldn’t tell the difference between Jennifer Aniston and Meryl Streep. I couldn’t tell Sandra Bullock from Jennifer Lopez. It was like looking at pickup-stick piles of facial features. I could tell that these people had faces. I could see the pieces of the faces. I just couldn’t tell what the faces looked like when you put the pieces together.
That feeling you get when you recognize somebody? That little pop of recognition? I looked at hundreds of faces that day, and I never felt it once.
By the end of the fifth test, I was in tears.
“That’s enough for today, choonks,” Dr. Nicole said, putting her arm around me for a side hug.
“Did you just call me chunks?” I asked. What on earth could that mean?
“Choonks,” she corrected. “It means sweetheart in Trinidad.”
That felt really good for a second. I liked being a sweetheart.
But then I started crying again.
She squeezed my shoulders tighter. “I know it’s a lot.”
“The thing is…” I said, really giving into the crying now. “The thing is … I just don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
“We’re not going to worry about the future,” she said. “We’re going to focus on the here and now. You’re healing great. You’ve taken care of your cerebrovascular issue. You’ve done the hard part.”
She was patting my back now.
My thoughts were churning like a cement mixer. “What if,” I said, voicing my worst fear, “I get stuck like this?”
That’s when Dr. Nicole shifted her position to face me. I looked down at my blanket. “When I hear you say unproductive things,” she said then, “I’m going to call your attention to them and challenge them.”
“Did I say an unproductive thing?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What did I say?”
“Here’s a hypothetical question,” she said next. “If there’s a five percent chance something bad will happen, and a ninety-five percent chance that things will be fine, which one is more likely?”
Was this a trick question? “That things will be fine?”
She nodded. “I want you to work on that.”
“Work on what?”
“On which of your thoughts you’re going to choose to indulge in.”
“Is this about my worrying I’ll get stuck like this?”
She nodded again. “Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”