h of achild is typically associated with great joy.

But for today's guest, the birth of her first child brought with it medical complications that nearly took her life.

Samina Ali shares the journey of that birth and her long recovery this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Novelist Samina Ali, whose new book is titled "Pieces You'll Never Get Back, A Memoir of Unlikely Survival."

She joins us today from San Francisco, California.

Samina, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- The book is powerful and emotional and a rare glimpse into a really horrifying story.

We're gonna talk about that in a minute, but we want us to take a little time just to get to know you a little bit in your own personal journey.

So I know you were born in India, and I want maybe you could tell us just a little bit about your own journey to the United States.

- Absolutely.

So I was born in India and my father came over in the early 70s when immigration had opened up to different parts of the world.

And, but with the caveat that the person who is immigrating here has a higher college degree, and my dad was an engineer and he had graduated from a top university in India.

So he was given an immigration visa and he came to Minnesota of all places.

So I am both a South Asian, I'm both a South Indian girl and a Midwestern girl.

Basically it's, he landed in Minnesota, because one of his best friends happened to also immigrate there.

So that was the only person he knew in the US.

So I, I'm sorry.

- [Jim] No, go right ahead.

- So we came over, I was about two, but I have to say that I grew up very bicultural, bilingual, because even after we immigrated, my dad sent my two brothers and me back to India every single year.

So I did part of my schooling in India and part of my schooling in the US and was utterly confused.

- (laughs) When did you realize that you wanted to write?

- I realized I wanted to write very young, but it's, you know, I am from an Indian family and it wasn't something that was very, I don't, well, it wasn't very approved.

Let's just say that.

My parents really were hoping that I'd either go into medicine or become an attorney or become, you know, go into engineering.

Something that was something they could understand, and art and trying to make a living as a writer was not something they could understand.

But I had always felt like I needed to write.

And like I said, you know, whenever I went back to India and did schooling there, all of the other students in my class would say, "Oh, look, look, the American girl is back."

And whenever I came back to the US and was dropped back into school, all my classmates would say, "Oh look, the Indian girl is back."

And because I was going back and forth and because I wasn't really in one place for that long, I didn't have very many friends.

So reading and writing were my comfort.

- Samina, do you remember what type of writing you were doing when you were younger?

Was it fiction?

Was it nonfiction, poetry?

I mean, what, give us a sense of what captivated you.

What form, format and formats.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I did a lot of fiction writing.

I was always a fiction writer.

I think my first book is a novel, and it was the imaginary world I was drawn to.

And it was where I could most successfully convey what I was going through with my own back and forth, you know, migration to the two different Twin Cities.

So I was in the Twin Cities of Hyderabad-Secunderabad and then I was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

So my twin cities were like my twin selves.

- [Wayne] Wow.

- [Jim] Wow, that's powerful.

- Wow, that's powerful.

So also religion captivated you, you know, we were talking about that before we did the show and life experiences in India and here in the US introduced you to many face, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Sikhism rather and more.

Can you speak to the commonalities of those religions?

And again, when you read the book and we urge everyone to read this very important book, you will see you explicating on that.

But just give us sort of a brief overview of the commonalities of all these religions.

- In India, you know, they, all of the religions of the world are in India.

We have Buddhism, we have Islam, we have Hinduism, Sikhism or Astronism, Christianity, Judaism, I mean, it is a spiritual country and religion is just part of life there.

It's not something that people deny, it's just part of your identity.

So, and in the US of course, I was also very much part of the larger Christian and, you know, world here.

I actually went to a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

And so I was growing up doing Bible studies.

I was growing up in my school, every Friday we had Mass, and I would go to Mass.

And so it was just something that was just part of our, part of my life and going and doing Bible studies, going to Mass, this wasn't something that my parents even thought was a problem.

And the reason is because, and I think a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of the many, if not all of the prophets that are named in both the Torah and the Bible also are named in the Quran.

And if you think about it, the Bible, you know, all literature is in conversation with other books out there.

So when my novel went out, and it was a book about immigration, it was in conversation with other books that are about immigration.

And I think that the same holds true for religious texts.

And the Quran, for instance, will mention Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary, Abraham.

It will mention Moses, it will mention all of these prophets, but it won't go into detail about their stories.

So it assumes that I've already come into contact with those stories, that I've arrived at the text already knowing their stories.

And it was in fact in Bible studies classes at my school that I learned the full stories.

And I would go, "Oh, this is what (indistinct) talking about when they're talking about Abraham.

Oh, this is who Isaac is and this is this story."

So it just, it's just fascinating to me how connected the different faiths are.

- Yeah, so we wanna spend some time obviously talking about pieces you'll never give back.

This is a profoundly personal and intimate story.

And I wonder if you could maybe for folks who haven't had a chance to read it yet, maybe a quick overview.

We'll get into some of the details I think in the conversation.

But what I really wanna know is what compelled you to actually write it, to tell this story to the public?

- The story is about how when I was 29 years old, I had been pregnant with my son, my first born.

And at the time, because I was 29 and I was healthy and I was young, I was considered very low risk in terms of my pregnancy.

And I wanna emphasize here that I wasn't under the care, I wasn't giving birth in India, I was actually under the care of doctors here at UCSF, which was at that point known as UCSF Stanford Healthcare.

So I was in San Francisco.

So the book really follows what happened during that pregnancy and delivery.

I know the question that you've asked is, you know, what inspired me to write it?

And what had happened is the complications from the delivery had resulted in mass global brain trauma, which took years for me to overcome and heal from.

And three and a half years after I gave birth to my son, I had a follow-up appointment with my neurologist.

And it was at that point that he said, you know, "Your brain scans have come back and they're finally normal."

You know, the brain has finally shrunk back down to its normal size.

It's beautifully wrinkled.

We still see the damage here, but it's calcified.

It was a moment that I'd never thought I would get to.

I never thought that my neurologist would finally say, you know, "I'm not gonna say you're healed, because when you have brain trauma, you're never fully healed."

And I still have different difficulties, but it was a point where he said, you know, "You're well enough now to go off on your own."

He was the one who at that point said, "You know, in my 25 years of being a neurologist, I've never had a patient go as far as you did and come back.

And not only did you come back, but you have, you're a writer, and you need to tell this story, because as doctors, we can tell patients from the outside what's happening to them, but from the inside, you can do a much better job and let us know."

And I have to be honest, when he said that, I remember walking away from that final appointment and thinking, "Hell no.

I'm never going back.

(group laughing) I will never write this story.

I'm walking away."

And I think, you know, we have seasons of grief and we grieve at, you know, in different ways and over different eras.

And it took me a long time to finally say, "I'm ready to write the story."

And it's, you know, it's been 25 years.

- So let's go back to you giving birth to your son Ishmael, the first few days after you gave birth were hell.

You had sustained brain damage, there was damage to other organs.

The care team, in fact, were sure that you're going to die.

Do you have any memory of those few days?

And then we're going to have you do a reading that will maybe put some of this in context, but do you have any memory of those horrible days when, you know, your then husband, your doctors and nurses all thought, "Given the extent of damage, there is simply no way that this young woman can survive?"

- Yeah, it's, Wayne, I have to tell you that's a question that my neurologist asked me over and over again when I landed in, emerged from, you know, finally emerged from the coma.

You know, again and again, he would say, "What are your last memories?

What is the last thing you remember?

What is the last thing you remember?"

And the last thing I remember from the trauma was I was in the delivery room and I had been complaining about chest pain and I'd been complaining about head pain.

The pain in my head was so massive, it was so extreme that it debilitated me.

I couldn't keep my eyes open.

And I remember saying to the doctor and to the nurses, "Why am I experiencing more pain up in my head and in my chest than I should be experiencing, you know, I'm delivering, I should be experiencing birth pain right now, but I'm in fact experiencing more pain up here."

And the doctor unfortunately didn't take it seriously.

And I remember that I was given Alka-Seltzer for the chest pain.

And then for my head pain, they just gave me a mask, which women are given when they're in delivery to take the edge off the labor pains.

And 20 minutes after I delivered, I had a grand mal seizure, which is the worst seizure you can have.

And it cut off oxygen to my brain for 30 seconds.

And it was at that point that the doctor said, "Oh my God, she's been complaining.

Maybe there is something wrong."

And it turned out that I had multiple organ failure.

My liver had failed, my kidneys had failed, I had pulmonary edema.

And the chest pain that I've been given Alka-Seltzer for turned out to be a heart attack.

And of course, my head, the reason I was having such pain in my head was because of all of the brain damage, the trauma, the hemorrhages, the strokes.

So during those early days, I was in a coma for five days.

And during that time, my family was told that if I was lucky, I would just die.

Because they assumed that if I came back, they assumed that if I lived on life support, then one of my family members would have to care for me, that I would be their ward.

And so those early days when I did come back, I came back with such extensive brain trauma that I couldn't remember that I had delivered.

And I couldn't remember that I was married.

I didn't remember my husband.

I really didn't have any memories at all.

And so the doctor kept saying, "What is it you remember?

What are the last things you remember?"

- Wow.

So those first few days you were in intensive care, your son obviously was not with you, he was on a different floor in the hospital.

But at some point, not too long after you gave birth, an MRI was done.

And the neurologist came and spoke to you, and we've asked him to do a reading that recounts that scene.

And again, there are so many powerful, by the way, I started reading this book and I could not stop it.

And so many powerful things.

But this one really stands out both for the power of it and how it explains your quote, "miraculous recovery."

So do you mind doing the reading?

- Absolutely.

So, like you said, this is an excerpt that from the book, this takes place when I'm in the neuro ICU.

I've woken up from the coma.

It's been a few days, and I'm still not remembering my son.

I'm still not remembering my life, I'm still not remembering my husband.

They'd been doing MRIs over and over again of my brain.

And another MRI had just been conducted and whatever came back seemed to have alarmed my neurologist.

So it begins, "The latest MRI scan results had just come back and it was clear that something about them had disturbed the neurologist.

He spoke slowly to me and intentionally watching my face for any signs of understanding.

'In a healthy brain,' he explained, 'all the pieces fit together.

The connections between brain cells are called neuropathways.

Those pathways keep everything running smoothly.'

To illustrate this, he interlaced his fingers, locking his two hands together.

'The global trauma to your brain has scattered those pieces.'

He pulled his hands apart and held them up and held up all 10 fingers for me to see splayed apart.

'Your job from here on out is to recover as many puzzle pieces as possible to put yourself back together.'

At the time, I was too debilitated to understand what he was telling me.

And I remember looking as intently into his face as he was mine, searching for clues from his expression.

Despite the concern I detected in his voice, he kept his face emotionless, probably intentionally so as not to alarm me.

He must have seen my confusion, because he finally patted my arm and said, 'You know what?

I think it might be a good day for you to meet your son.'

As my nurse slipped inside the curtain carrying a needle for yet another blood draw, the neurologist told her, 'Let's get Ishmael down here tomorrow.

Meeting him might be the spark mom here needs.'"

- [Wayne] Wow.

- You know, Samina, the emotional power of your story and the journey that you've been through really can't be overstated.

We've talked to other authors about creating empathy in their characters.

It's your story that evokes the empathy here.

And so I wonder just, you know, this is not your first book.

You're a published author, you understand the power of empathy.

How does that play differently as a writer when you are the person evoking, inspiring that empathy?

- I think it's important as an author to rise up beyond, you know, stories are universal.

And one of the most important things about my brain trauma was I describe how it was in fact writing my novel that helped me to recover.

Because one of the things the neurologists were, you know, about six weeks after I gave birth, one of the neurologists I had seen at a followup exam told me that I would never write again.

Because he said that writing required so many different parts of the brain.

And I still remember he said, you know, "To write, you need this part of the brain and this part of the brain, and this part of the brain, and this part of the brain."

And he said, "It all comes together, imagination, memory, words, you know, everything that we can think of."

And I had lost the higher cognitive functions, the functions to think, to imagine, to envision a future.

Those things that are so inherent to being a human being, those things that separate us from animals.

So the process of writing is so, it's a higher function for humans.

And writing my novel was what helped me to recover from the brain damage, because I was literally pulling those neurons that had not been connected before, forcing them to reconnect and rewiring my brain.

The empathy that I discovered is simply that, you know, as humans, we're so deeply connected on an experiential level.

And unfortunately, you know, all of us experience these seasons of grief when we experience death.

I might have experienced it at this level, but there is a part in the book when I describe bardo, this Buddhist term, which talks about how all of us experience death on many different levels, many times in our life.

And bardo is really the little deaths that we all experience.

So divorce is bardo.

You know, being told that you have an illness or losing your job, anything that changes your life and the direction that you thought you were going, and to suddenly finding yourself in a different direction, that sense, that feeling of having the rug being pulled out from underneath you, that is that sense of bardo, those little deaths that constantly occur.

So for me, empathy really required me to help people to understand that I may be talking about something that happened to me on this grand level, but each and every single one of us experience trauma and grief.

And each of us go through seasons of darkness.

And my hope through this book is not to call attention to something that I went through as trauma, but my hope is to show that we all have the resilience and we all have the power, and we all have the strength to pull through those dark seasons.

We simply have to turn within ourselves and we have to trust in each other, trust in humanity, trust that the light will carry us forward.

- You write that death is also, as you were describing it now, an opportunity for rebirth and for new life.

And that certainly applies to your story.

Would you agree?

- Absolutely.

But yeah, I absolutely agree with that.

It's an opportunity I think that we're so afraid and again, this goes back to being bicultural.

In India, everyone talks about death.

It's just part of life.

It's something that we accept as a part of life and we're not afraid of it.

And in the West, every time I came back to the US, no one wants to talk about death.

No one wants to talk about grief.

No one wants to talk about the process of healing.

And it's unfortunate, because it means that so many of us have to go through darknesses alone.

And I'm hoping that maybe by talking about what I went through, it will give permission to people to begin talking about their own pain and things that they've gone through.

I've certainly heard from a great many readers who've reached out to me and thanked me and then shared their own stories with me.

And so I hope that it continues that dialogue.

- You know, Samina, you talk a little bit about how your sense of self, even your personality changed because of the trauma.

And I'm wondering, you know, when you go through an experience like that, what sustained you as a person on that long recovery?

And we've got literally about a minute left here.

- Well, I was raising a newborn at the time.

(group laughing) And any new parent will tell you that it's not possible anymore to think about yourself.

And I mean, when you have a newborn, even, you know, when you are as, you know, debilitated as I was, he just at a certain point in my recovery, he became both my companion, because we were experiencing so many of our milestones together, learning to walk, learning to speak, so many things happened together with us.

So he was my companion, he was my inspiration, and he was also my newborn, somebody that I had to take care of and nurture.

So it forced me, it forced me to rise up beyond myself and to have hope and to push and push and push in order to get better.

- It is a remarkable story and a remarkable telling of it.

Samina Ali, the book is "Pieces You'll Never Get Back."

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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