Vanessa Potter: She Woke Up Seeing and Went to Bed Blind.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2017
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In just 72-hours, Vanessa Potter went from sighted to blind, and able-bodied to paralyzed. Nothing would ever be the same.
This is the story of brain gone haywire that led to a life transformed.
Guest: A married mother of two young kids, Potter spent 16 years as an award-winning broadcast producer in London. Then, in October 2012 fate conspired to turn the lights out on her, and overnight she found herself blind and unable to walk.
Vanessa’s response, was anything but usual. She began to document the entire journey on audio. Her curiosity and quest for answers led her to Cambridge University persuading neuroscientists to help her research what was happening in her brain, This led to a powerful collaboration on a brainwave-imaging project that invited members of the public to see and hear their own brainwaves translated into music and art.
Potter was invited to give a TEDx talk and recently shared more of her story in her first, Patient H69: The Story of my Second Sight. In today's Good Life Project podcast, we talk about what led to that fateful day, what actually happened in her body and brain, the incredibly unusual way she learned to cope and then thrive with a new reality, and how she is today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'd start off in the morning with a little bit of numbness like my fingertips were just |
| 0:06.0 | really cold and suddenly I moved and I slur as my whole hand all my fingers had gone numb. |
| 0:13.6 | And things progress pretty quickly from them. It's just a big blur that actually just got |
| 0:18.0 | darker and darker. From the very first day I went to hospital, it was 72 hours before |
| 0:23.6 | I was completely and utterly blind. And that paralysis kept on going. It went all the way |
| 0:28.7 | up my fingers, up my arms and all the way up my legs and it left me paralyzed and unable |
| 0:35.4 | to feel or use my hands. So I was helpless like a baby. I couldn't see and I couldn't feel |
| 0:42.4 | the world. |
| 0:43.4 | Imagine waking up one day and feeling like you were wearing sunglasses but you weren't wearing |
| 0:52.2 | sunglasses. And then within 72 hours your vision being gone. |
| 0:58.4 | That is what happened to today's guest Vanessa Potter. It's a bit of a horrifying scary |
| 1:03.7 | story that's been documented in her book Patient H69. And it's a story that is powerful, |
| 1:14.2 | gets us in touch with the uncertainty in our lives and also really visits how we respond |
| 1:21.0 | to big challenging traumatic things that we don't and can't see coming in our lives. |
| 1:28.9 | And the difference between circumstance, choice and what we do with what happens to |
| 1:34.0 | us. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. |
| 1:42.5 | It's good to be hanging out with you today actually. First heard about your story. I was |
| 1:48.4 | floored as I'm sure you hear many times. So I kind of want to just dive right in with you. |
| 1:53.7 | While we're sitting here today, you're looking at me and we'll go into why that's interesting |
| 1:58.1 | through the conversation. But you've been through this incredible journey. It sounds like |
| 2:02.0 | over the last five years or so. I want to take a step back in time and then we'll get to |
| 2:06.0 | what you've been through. Spent it sounds like the better part of your life in TV production. |
... |
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