Blinking is neither the fastest nor the most accurate way to communicate. It was, however, the only way left for Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of France's Elle magazine. He suffered a stroke in 1995 that left him almost totally paralyzed, yet he was determined to write a book. Bauby dictated his story by having a colleague recite the alphabet to him and then blinking his left eyelid to select each letter of each sentence. "Something like a giant invisible diving bell holds my whole body prisoner," he wrote in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Knopf), published just before he died in 1997. In the book, he recorded the difficulties of communicating with his friends, family, and doctors.
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