Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel Read Online Free PDF Page A

the glass hadn’t cut all the way through, and she’d been wearing her helmet the whole time. I was so relieved she was all right, and I realized how much I really did care for her. Her coworker had only minor injuries, but he could easily have been killed. It was always scary in the oil fields, and always dangerous, but although I hate to admit it, it was also thrilling, all of it.
    Somehow we all managed to survive that work assignment and we made it back home to civilization.
    When I was in Anchorage, my friend Rick Cordova was my go-to pal for good times. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was popular with the ladies and was always upsetting one jealous boyfriend or another. Sometimes it was just because he showed up to a bar looking really good. He hadn’t done anything at all—
yet.
Once we were walking in the mall and some guy with a beef started to run toward him, his arm pulled back to deliver a punch. I yelled, “Duck!” Rick hit the deck, and the guy missed. We were a good team.
    When I married Melissa, Rick traveled all the way to our wedding in Montana. Despite Melissa and I not wanting to get too serious, she’d gotten pregnant back in Alaska. One day, right after we found out, I ran into her uncle. He was an oil executive who worked up on the slope. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” he said sternly. So I did. I proposed.
    I’d been incredibly nervous and uncertain about marriage and family at first, but a couple of months before the baby was due, I started to become excited—I wanted to be a father. This made it especially devastating when Jason Padgett Jr. was born premature and lived only a couple of days. He died in my arms as I rocked him back and forth in a chair in a corner of the hospital room. Melissa and I just stood there like zombies during the funeral. He was the only thing that had kept us together, but neither of us realized how much we had wanted him until tragedy struck. Melissa and I clung to each other for another year, then we divorced. I think of her often and of the little boy who bore my name.
    If Jason Jr. had lived, I might have settled down and become a real family man. Who knows? Fate had dealt me a different hand and I went right on back to my partying ways. It was just who I was. That’s not to say I never had a quiet moment of introspection or that I was totally shallow in those years. There were times in my early life when I took responsibility for myself, and for others too. Still, the majority of my younger years are a blur. I was spinning like a top in pursuit of stimulation. I had to find excitement outside my own mind, as I had very little inner life, and the inner life I did have wasn’t anything I wanted to dwell on. As I mentioned, my parents each went through a string of divorces and remarriages, and my brother, John, became increasingly troubled and estranged from the rest of us as he grew older.
    Despite my outward happy-go-lucky, party-guy persona, there was an undercurrent of seediness in the club life I lived, from the drama of the promiscuity to the violence of the alcohol-fueled fights. Behavior that was cute or at least expected when I was in my twenties—boys will be boys, after all—became a little sad when I was in my thirties, as I kept to the same habits while most everyone else was settling down.
    By that point I’d had another child, a beautiful daughter named Megan, with one of my girlfriends, Michelle. I was overjoyed when she was born healthy, and I loved her completely, but marrying her mother wasn’t something that appealed to me, and it didn’t appeal to Michelle either. For a while, we rented on the same floor in the same apartment building so that Megan could just run between our homes and have us both near. But having a daughter didn’t change my partying ways. As long as I kept moving, kept drinking, kept hooking up and laughing, I didn’t have to face anything inside that might be troubling me.
    I’d fallen short of