The insights that Flaherty offered McHugh included an additional bonus. She was also helpful in encouraging a friendship between him and someone else who had experienced similar compulsions -- Jon Sarkin, the former chiropractor from Gloucester.
"Jon and Tommy are sort of in a permanently heightened state of emotionality," Flaherty said.
In that regard, she was able to offer both men a simple diagnosis that stemmed from her own experience: Sarkin and McHugh were not crazy. Their strokes created lesions that, in rare circumstances, appear to give trauma victims a new ability.
"Jon's was back far in his brain and in an area that affects basic functions," she said. "His head is full of ideas and they just spill out in his art. It's packed with words and ideas ... his poetry, his paintings. Tommy had a ruptured brain aneurysm. And it really bathed his brain with blood, but not in any way that caused permanent big scars."
In a joint effort worthy of the kinds of quirky plots you see in buddy movies, Sarkin and McHugh mounted a joint exhibition of their works at the Novas Gallery in Liverpool.
"The guy [McHugh] talks non-stop," Sarkin said. "I just looked at him and I said, 'You know, like, you're crazy but you make a lot of sense, my friend.' It was cool."
There is no name for the rare condition that resulted from their strokes, but if you're looking for the key element in this medical mystery, it may have less to do with creative inspiration than it has to do with the furious drives that were unleashed in these two men by their brain traumas -- drives that essentially forced them to create.
For Sarkin, though, his artistic drive merely revealed the person he feels he was always meant to be.
"I'm really lucky," he said, "because I understand the sense of my life now."
For more information on Jon Sarkin's story, visit his Web site and for more information on Tommy McHugh's story, click here.
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