The diving bell stands for the paralysed body, the butterfly for the mind that has no limits.
This piece belongs to a series of 100 posts written in memory of Thom's grandmother, published on her Facebook.
How Not to Die by Dr Michael Greger (published in Vietnamese as “Ăn gì không chết”) is the book that did the most to push me towards learning about the brain and about nature. I cannot remember why reading it led me to the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, but it is a story that brings up a great deal of feeling whenever I think about it.
And what follows is from the author’s own memoir, a book that was also made into a film
In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of French Elle, had a stroke that left him in a coma for weeks. In his 1997 memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he tells how he woke after three weeks but could no longer control the muscles of his own body. Damage to the brainstem left him completely paralysed, though he stayed completely lucid.
Like some patients with this locked-in syndrome, Bauby could still blink one eye, and that was how he communicated with the people around him.
And in a feat that stunned medicine the world over, he blinked around 200,000 times across more than 10 months to write his memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
The title of the book and of the film is a metaphor for Bauby’s condition, with the diving bell standing for the paralysed body and the butterfly for the mind that has no limits.
Bauby spent two months on it, 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the help of Claude Mendibil, a ghostwriter and freelance book editor sent by his publisher, Robert Laffont. Claude would use the French alphabet arranged by how often each letter occurs in French; she would read it out and stop at a letter when he blinked to choose it!
This book was translated into Vietnamese by Thái Hà Books a very long time ago, and it seems it has not been reprinted since.
Here is an important excerpt from the film
https://youtu.be/4Ss0QiJUlXE?si=nA3uLq28S-RU0FlM
Those two weeks in their house were the loveliest thing I had in Athens.
The only thing I want to do with them: read together.
She told me that only that English video really worked, and that she has been able to go back to work.