Essay on A Day in the lLife of Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby was born in Paris France on April 23rd 1952, he had two children a son named Theophile and a daughter named Celeste. After working as a journalist for The Quotidien de Paris and Paris Match magazine for four years, in 1991 Bauby had finally became a well known author, journalists and editor in chief of a French fashion magazine called Elle. As Bauby quickly made his way to the top of the corporate ladder his dreams were suddenly shattered. On December 8th, 1995 at the age of forty three Bauby had a stroke and fell into an induced coma for twenty days. After being in a coma for twenty days, Bauby awoke only to discover that his entire body was paralyzed leaving him unable to speak, eat, breath or move on his own. Bauby†¦show more content†¦When confronted with questions as to why he no longer wanted to partake in speech therapy Bauby communicated that he felt the system was to slow, his therapist was moving to fast and the system wasn’t working. In his efforts to discontinue learning Partner-assisted scanning or listener-assisted scanning, Bsuby communicated to his therapist in their next session â€Å"I want to die.† Fed up with his negative attitude his speech therapist scolded him and convinced him that there are a lot of people who care about him and that life is worth living. With these words of encouragement Bauby took a new outlook on life stating I decided to stop pitying myself. Other tha n my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed, my imagination and my memory. With this new attitude and outlook on life Bauby started making more of an effort to learn this new form of communication. As a result Bauby would spend long hours constructing and memorizing each sentence that he wanted to use in his head so that he could quickly relate what he wanted to say to his transcriber speeding up the process. Eventually over time Bauby had mastered this technique so well to the point that he could create one word in under three minutes. In spite of the difficulties Bauby had to endure he ended up writing a 140 page autobiography called â€Å"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly†. In his autobiography Bauby described what his life was like before and after he had the stroke and reflected on his personal experience of what it was