I'd turn sideways and disappear.īut my hands and feet were huge. I got headaches because my eyes were, like, enemies, you know, like they used to be married to each other but then hated each other's guts.Īnd I started wearing glasses when I was three, so I ran around the reservation (the rez!) looking like a three-year-old Indian grandpa.Īnd, oh, I was skinny. My brain damage left me nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, so my ugly glasses were all lopsided because my eyes were so lopsided. Indian Health Service also funded eyeglass purchases only once a year and offered one style: those ugly, thick, black plastic ones. But the Indian Health Service funded major dental work only once a year, so I had to have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day.Īnd what's more, our white dentist believed that Indians felt only half as much pain as white people did, so he gave us only half the Novocain. I went to Indian Health Service to get some teeth pulled so I could eat normally, not like some slobbering vulture. My teeth got so crowded that I could barely close my mouth. The typical human has thirty-two, right? But I had forty-two. I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't, but I have all sorts of physical problems that are directly the result of my brain damage.įirst of all, I ended up having forty-two teeth.

And even if I somehow survived the mini-Hoover, I was supposed to suffer serious brain damage during the procedure and live the rest of my life as a vegetable. I was only six months old and I was supposed to croak during the surgery. Maybe the whole thing is weird and funny.īut, jeez, did my mother and father and big sister and grandma and cousins and aunts and uncles think it was funny when the doctors cut open my little skull and sucked out all that extra water with some tiny vacuum? Okay, so maybe that's not a very serious way to say it, either. My thinking and breathing and living engine slowed down and flooded.īut that makes the whole thing sound weirdo and funny, like my brain was a giant French fry, so it seems more serious and poetic and accurate to say, 'I was born with water on the brain.' But weirdo me, I was born with too much grease inside my skull, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works. And brain grease works inside the lobes like car grease works inside an engine.

But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctors' fancy way of saying brain grease. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skull. Read more about this selection and other winners.

The following is an excerpt from the winner of the 2007 National Book Award for young people's literature.

The true diary of a part time indian