Imagine the paralysis endured by the editor of French Vogue (the story that was recently put to screen in The Diving Bell and the Butterly), redeployed in the world of astronomy, and you’d have this story of a brilliant scientist confined to speaking nonsensically to her friends and family from the confines of her hospital bead after a near-deadly car crash. Faced with the breakdown of her conventional modes of expression, the aphasia-afflicted astronomer and those closest to her have to rethink not only how they communicate, but what doing so even means.