His friends frequently drop by and take him out to get lunch, to crack him up.
Sitting around the dining room table on a recent afternoon, eight of them told stories about the years just before the accident. The center of attention seemed sullen at first. He stirred after hearing a few familiar stories. The one about nabbing bags of stale doughnuts from a local coffee shop and whipping them at taxis. The time he knocked a friend off a chair with a well-placed firecracker. The laughter escalated with each story, Adam showed a smile, and then, after a while, the group grew quiet.
“You got a story, Adam?” said one friend, Sean Steinbacher.
“Yeah, speak up,” said another, Shane DiRisio. He was not kidding. “What’s wrong with you, Adam? You don’t have a story?”
He did not. He had a comment. He looked up at them affectionately. “These guys,” he said with a smile, “all suck.”
STARTING OVER
Feinberg sees delusions of identification as primitive psychological defenses, as a result of injuries in the right frontal lobes that most such patients are struggling with. Such defenses include denial that a disability exists, the projection of the problem onto others or the fantasy that daily life is somehow unreal.
“These are the defenses of a child of age 3 to 8,” Feinberg said. “But it’s important to understand that these defenses are a positive adaptation. The brain is fighting for survival.”
The ability to inhibit those defenses, to understand that not everyone shares them, is evidence that the frontal areas of the brain are coming back online, he said.
In recent weeks, Adam has been having fewer and fewer delusions. On an hourlong drive last month to a ranch in Groton, New York, that offers horseback riding for people with disabilities, Adam’s mind was churning. “Ma,” he asked repeatedly. “What happened to me?”
“You tell me, Ad,” his mother said at one point. “You just told me a minute ago. You know what happened. You know.”
“I don’t want to tell you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll think I’m crazy,” he said.
“No I won’t. Tell me.”
“No,” said Adam Lepak, and he looked out the window for a while, seemingly lost in thought.
“Ma?” he said, still staring out the window.
“Yes, Ad.”
“I think I had a motorcycle accident.”
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