Vascular neurologist and doomsday preparation enthusiast, Dr. E. S. Kemia, was watching Fox News, as he does every evening, when they began live-televising a support rally for presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had taken the stage and was strumming the paranoid heartstrings of the American people when Dr. Kemia noticed something peculiar.
“There I was pounding my fists on the coffee table and echoing the ‘Hallelujahs’ with the crowd,” said Dr. Kemia, “when I suddenly realized, I had no idea what Palin was actually saying.” Dr. Kemia, through great personal effort, withdrew himself from the intoxicating cloud of conservative clichés and began to focus on the pattern and substance of Palin’s speech.
“She was spectacularly fluent; flawlessly streaming together a litany of words with complex internal rhymes and poetic cadence. However, she seemed to have entirely lost her ability to use sentence structure or punctuation and was completely incomprehensible.”
After watching the entire nonsensical display, Dr. Kemia postulated that this speech pattern could only be the result of a microembolism, causing ischemic injury to a tiny part of Brodmann area 22 just anterior to Wernicke’s area.
“I knew this was my moment to make medical history,” said Dr. Kemia. “My years of neurological residency, my vascular fellowship and most importantly, the countless hours I spent in M1 neurology pinpointing isolated brain lesions to explain random clusters of symptoms were finally paying off!”
That evening Dr. Kemia sent an urgent letter to the Trump-Palin campaign, imploring Mrs. Palin to come to his hospital and undergo CT scan and MRA. His hopes are to prove his theory through neuroimaging and have “Palin’s Aphasia” added to every neurology textbook. Unfortunately, to date he has only received return correspondence in the form of a Trump-Palin 2016 tie pin and a bumper sticker that reads, “Speak English or Get Out!”
