By Mark Ellis —
She is a gifted singer who is part of the worship team at her church. But as a high school sophomore, she suffered a terrible surfing accident that left lasting effects.
“I wiped out and got hit in the back of the head on a bunch of rocks,” Sydney Noelle, 20, told God Reports. She and a friend had been surfing near a rocky point at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point, California.
“I surfaced to what I thought to be a minor concussion. But a few days passed, and I began to experience more intense symptoms.”
She was dizzy all the time and had difficulty focusing. Even her ability to sing was affected. “I couldn’t sing, which is kind of a bad thing if your goal is to be a singer. Every musical note sent excruciating vibrations through my head, and I would lose my balance.”
Sydney had a couple months of rest and physical therapy before she returned to school in November. But a year later, her brain was not processing information as it did before.
“I could recognize letters, but I couldn’t recognize numbers,” she says. When Sydney looks at numbers, they appear to be in motion, shifting around like worms.
Everyday tasks became challenging. “I couldn’t take math or science or even music theory in high school. My peers at school were afraid to work with me, and they made up rumors that I was making up my disability to get out of classes.”
She learned that people treat others differently with disabilities. “It’s hard for them to have empathy and to understand the challenges that we face,” she notes.
Raised Catholic, she began to question her faith, and went through a dark time spiritually. “I stopped reading my Bible and I fell into a really dark hole.”
Why is this happening to me? she wondered. I don’t understand why this is happening…
“I started to even doubt God, but one verse in psalms stuck with me through it all, Psalm 34:18:
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
“I felt crushed in spirit dealing with my brain injury stuff, but in my brokenness, I felt God used the people around me to lift me up. I had some amazing teachers to lift me up, and my true family and friends were there every step of the way.”
When Sydney was invited to sing as part of the worship team at Capo Beach Church in Dana Point, California, it lifted her spirits and she began to grow in her faith.
Searching for answers, her family found a research professor at Johns Hopkins University, Michael McCloskey, who specializes in cognitive recognition and neuroscience. They could only find one other person in the US with symptoms partially resembling Sydney’s following a brain injury. There is no name for her condition.
“While we didn’t find a cure to the things going on in my brain, we did find work arounds to these everyday tasks.” Sydney learned braille, so she could operate keypads using braille, like those used on elevators.
She can’t read a clock, so she asks Siri on her phone to read her the time. When she is at a restaurant with friends, she asks for someone to read her the total on the bill. “I try to use cash most of the time because I can pay the bill based on the faces, so I have the faces memorized.”
Currently a music major at Concordia University in Irvine, the music department has been willing to accommodate her disability to an extraordinary degree.
Because she can’t read sheet music conventionally, they derived a color-coding system on Sydney’s behalf. The musical note ‘A’ is the color red. If it’s B, it’s orange. If it’s C, it’s yellow, and so forth.
“They even hired student workers to color code all of my work and for my academic classes,” she says.
.Despite her trials, Sydney is facing the future with faith. “God taught me a lot of things through it. It taught me perseverance. It taught me to strengthen my faith in Him, and it just further proves how at your lowest, God can carry you out of your darkness.
“I hope that I can live up to what I know God has planned. That’s what I always try to do with my life and my music, and even with my brain injury. I know it’s something God put in my life because he knew I could handle it and he knows I can help someone through what I went through.”
