Wednesday, November 20, 2013

December's story...."The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

Our meeting is scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, December 10th @ 6pm.  The meeting will take place at; 2000 Highland Drive, Prosser.

We will be discussing the book; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.  Celeste' Lynn will be our host for the evening.



The following excerpt was taken from; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (original French title: Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) is a memoir by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes what his life is like after suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. It also details what his life was like before the stroke.
On 9 December 1995, Bauby, the editor-in-chief of French Elle magazine, suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings, but physically paralyzed with what is known as locked-in syndrome , with the only exception of some movement in his head and eyes. His right eye had to be sewn up due to an irrigation problem. The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). Using partner assisted scanning, a transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome. These events include playing at the beach with his family, getting a bath, and meeting visitors whilst in hospital at Berck-sur-Mer.
The French edition of the book was published on 6 March 1997. It received excellent reviews, sold the first 25,000 copies on the day of publication, reaching 150,000 in a week. It went on to become a number one bestseller across Europe. Its total sales are now in the millions. On 9 March 1997, three days after the book was published, Bauby died of pneumonia.[1][2]



Jean-Dominique Bauby enjoying life before his stroke.

 

 
 
You may want to check out the 2007 film; " The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", based upon Bauby's book memoir.  You may also be interested in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial" which is a novel depicting a similar circumstance to Bauby's "locked in syndrome".


Quote from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly;

"I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”