Welcome to The Clueless Gent’s Homepage
I am the Clueless Gent because the more I learn in life, the more I realize just how much I don’t know. This may seem like an oxymoron ~ and maybe it is ~ but it’s been a truth and a driving force in my life.
I haven’t quite decided whether it is better to know a lot about a little or a little about a lot. Nevertheless, my pursuit of truth, knowledge and wisdom seems never-ending.
In the realm of knowledge, I thank my mother and my teachers for instilling in me a love of reading. I adore fiction! It is my main mode of transport to other lands, other times, and other people. Real or otherwise, I take whatever I can from stories and characters.
In The Clueless Gent website, I hope to share my love of reading and offer a glimpse into my perceptions of the world around me. If you have the mind to do so, please tag along for the ride!
Beginning in 2021, The Clueless Gent is offering a Texas-Centric, Bookish Podcast. I highly recommend you check it out! The purpose of the podcast is to promote and provide inspiration for the joy of reading and writing – especially in Texas! There will be a writing/reading-related guest on just about every episode. We’re not afraid to ask the dumb questions.
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Clueless Gent’s Most Recent Post
Second Lives
SECOND LIVES:
The Journey of Brain-Injury
Survivors and Their Healers
with Joyce Stamp Lilly
SYNOPSIS
“Discharged from a hospital just means you’re not dead.” These words of Ralph B. Lilly, M.D., describe his early struggle to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Lilly was a forty-four-year-old practicing neurologist sitting on his motorcycle at a red light when a drunk driver rear-ended him in 1980. In the ICU, after regaining consciousness and being told what happened, he asked, “What’s a hospital? What’s a motorcycle?” This tragic experience transformed his life and his approach to his neurology practice: doctors treat those with brain injury; but loved ones heal them.
Second Lives: The Journey of Brain Injury Survivors and Their Healers is written by Dr. Lilly and Diane F. Kramer. After his death in 2021, Kramer completed the book with the assistance of Lilly’s wife Joyce Stamp Lilly. This memoir weaves together Ralph Lilly’s experience with a collage of stories about his patients and their healers. After his recovery, Lilly retrained in the emerging field of behavioral neurology, which focuses on behavior, memory, cognition, and emotion after brain injury.
His clinical skills and expert witness testimony were sought by physicians, survivors, families, and attorneys to secure the best “second life” for survivors. His many patients marveled at his uniquely compassionate approach: “What doctor gives you his cell number and says call any time?” Lilly’s pioneering career spanned forty years from Brown University’s Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Rhode Island to Nexus Health System and private practice in Houston, Texas. He treated ER and hospital inpatients whose loved ones were in acute quandary, as well as outpatients who’d long given up finding a doctor who knew how to help. Lilly’s memoir is full of heart, not science, and will provide insight to general readers, family, and friends of patients with brain injury, as well as those who treat them.
His narration is unintentionally poignant, often punctuated by wry humor. He generously incorporates the words of his patients and their families in telling their stories. Their gratitude for his care is profound. As one former patient said, “Without Dr. Lilly, I’d be dead or in jail.”
