Brett Dietz was only 29 when he suffered a major stroke. It left him partially paralyzed and completely unable to speak. His doctors held out little hope that he would regain those functions, but after more than a year of rehab, his brain did manage to heal itself, pretty much. And today Dietz has almost fully recovered. His neurologist suggested he write a book about his experience, but being a composer, Dietz decided to write a piece of music instead -- an opera in fact. The result is "Headcase," which is being performed by the Portland Symphony Orchestra this Sunday.

Brett Dietz was only 29 when he suffered a major stroke. It left him partially paralyzed and completely unable to speak. His doctors held out little hope that he would regain those functions, but after more than a year of rehab, his brain did manage to heal itself, pretty much. And today Dietz has almost fully recovered. His neurologist suggested he write a book about his experience, but being a composer, Dietz decided to write a piece of music instead -- an opera in fact. The result is "Headcase," which is being performed by the Portland Symphony Orchestra this Sunday.

"In June of 2002 I actually had a stroke that was caused by a defect in my heart. And I basically was taken to the hospital, I was mute, couldn't read, couldn't write, and the doctors told my family that I had basically very little chance of getting any of this back," Dietz says. "They didn't know if I'd get any of it back and the diagnosis was pretty bleak, but luckily I managed to pull through a lot of it and I kept a journal for a year after I had the stroke. And the journal is actually where the libretto for the Opera comes from."

"Headcase" has a very strong visual component -- during the performance the audience is shown a series of slides featuring MRI scans of Dietz's stroke-damaged brain, and excerpts from the journal that he kept.

"I wrote this piece originally for the Pittsburgh new music ensemble," he says. "It's kind of a summer group that does some things in Pittsburgh and they're very multi-media heavy, in most of the performing that they do, I remember talking to the music director Kevin Noe, and saying 'Boy I really have this idea. I want to write this piece that involves my MRI slides, pre-recorded material and your ensemble.' And he said, 'That's great, let's do it.' So we did, and I wrote the piece, got the libretto from my journal and we did it two times in Pittsburgh and we've done it once with the Detroit Symphony and now this is the third performance in Portland."

After the first performance of Headcase in 2006, Dietz, who now teaches percussion at Louisiana State University, burned his journal. It was not easy, he says, keeping a diary while he was struggling with a brain injury and trying to get his speech back.

"It was very weird, especially if you go back and look at my journal, and there's some of it you can't make any sense of, and some of that sort of comes through in the opera a little bit too."

During his recovery, Dietz, who still has mild dyslexia from his stroke, also suffered with insomnia, and bouts of what he thought at the time was schizophrenia, as well as an eerie ability to recall long-forgotten childhood events -- all consistent with having a damaged left frontal lobe, says Dietz, the area of the brain he decribes as "our emotional and expressive core."

"When I first went to the hospital I couldn't really do anything, I couldn't talk to anybody. I could move a little bit, I had some weakness in my right arm, in my right leg, and then I finally starting talking a little bit in the hospital. My vocal cords sort of came back. I remember being in the MRI machine and I started growling, and the guys runnning the MRI starting going 'OK, OK that's good, but you need to calm down, just a minute, just a minute.' And then I started kind of talking after that and trying to say little things. I started speech therapy while I was still in the hospital. I had to start learning to read again, back with elementary school, like, English stuff, where I had to start all over again."

"They wanted me to count. They were always like 'OK, could you please count to 10? And I couldn't count but they said 'OK can you write it down?' And I started writing 1 over 1, 1 over 2, 1 over 3, which are time signatures in music. So I was kind of relating my counting to what I normally do, which is music."

Dietz is using this weekend's performance of Headcase to reach out to members of the medical community. Among them is Dr. Syed Kazmi, a physician at New England Rehab center in Portland, who specializes in helping stroke victims. "Music can play a significant role, depending on the patient's interest before the stroke," Kazmi says.

Dr. Kazmi met with Dietz ahead of a symposium planned for tonight at Maine Medical Center, where medical professionals and students are meeting the composer to discuss the therapuetic role music can play in helping patients recover from brain injuries.

Dr Kazmi says music and relaxation techniques can be an important part of improving a patient's concentration, "and kind of priming the brain for starting rehabilitation. Once they can concentrate more they can be engaged in more rehabilitation activities and then patients will start making more and more progress."

Brett Dietz says he hopes Headcase will help patients in their recovery. But, he adds, it's almost more important for friends and family of stroke victims to see it so they can understand what is really going on inside the head of their loved one.

"I remember one of the things that really drove me crazy was when I was trying to talk and people would be on the phone with me, and say 'just spit it out, just spit it out,' and it's like 'er, OK I'm trying. I'm not stupid. I have an injury.'"

Headcase is being performed by the Portland Symphony Orchestra in Portland's Merrill Auditorium at 2.30 p.m. on Sunday, with an open dress rehearsal starting at 10 a.m. that morning.

For more details visit portlandsymphony.com