All In My Head
Not like I don’t already obsess, but
this past winter, my frenemy, mortality, came calling. And it wasn’t a polite rap
on the door. It was more like a break-in.
After a summer of negotiating a house sale sans realtor,
selling a home and leaving the woods and hill I adored, and moving into a
small rental with 3 cats and husband while we waited for our new house to be built, I experienced a bout of vague but intense stress-related
symptoms. Stubborn me, I don’t trust realtors and besides, I thought my husband and I deserved all the proceeds
from the sale of our house, and as I worked toward that goal, my spirit bottomed
out. I’m the type who gets through the crisis, then collapses after. This time,
the physical manifestation included a weird light-headedness. My doctor, Dr. Y
said “anxiety, it’ll pass.” I got a second opinion from Dr. X, who said he
thought I was fine, but “let’s do an MRI to be safe.”
The MRI showed everything was fine with my brain, or to
quote my own joke. “Nothing’s there.” Yeah, my husband thought that was funny, as in,
of course, there’s nothing there. But there was a spot on the bone, the
doctor said, of no consequence. I figured they saw a bump from the forceps used
during my birth. If I run my fingertips over my skull, it maps like an
amusement ride with its various bumps and unique indentations. I thought it
made me special.
A few weeks later, I received the MRI report in the mail. To
my horror, it read, “spot on bone – cannot rule out aggressive lesion, bone
scan should be ordered if clinically warranted.” Seems Dr. X left that doomful
language out of his phone call. What the
hell, I thought; and despite my intermittent hypochondria, for
some odd reason, I STILL didn’t worry. Until I went for my yearly physical with
Dr. Y, who had also read the report. “We need to follow up on this.”
After one bone scan, one CAT scan, a meeting and subsequent phone
call with a neurosurgeon, I was scheduled for surgery. Brain surgery. Whatever
this “thingy” was had wavy edges and apparently everyone but me knew that if
something shows on up on a bone scan, it’s not good.
Christmas, January and part of February plus the preliminary
days leading up to the prior phone call from Dr. Z (neurosurgeon) caused internal freak-outs and sleepless
nights though all the while I pretended to be fine. I made jokes about it with my coworkers,
nibbled on the occasional valium, practiced deep breathing exercises with little success and cried more than a few times.
In the midst of this worry, my dear father passed away. I
hadn’t told my mother what was going on with me, so when I drove the 300 miles to join her at my father’s bedside, she asked, “what’s going on with your
head?” I glanced over at my sister and asked, right in front of mommy, “who told her?” It had been one of my brothers. The sweet
innocent, he didn’t know I was keeping my head issues a secret. So I told mom the truth, that they weren’t
really worried about me, but that the thingy had to come out. “I’m fine, ma.”
The week of my dad’s final illness and the following week of
his funeral, I thought very little about myself, I felt better and worried
less. Most humans, when faced with familial or emotional hurdles, rise to the
occasion, and I’m sure that’s how I operated: on auto-pilot except for the
grief I felt upon losing my father. Or was I also grieving for myself?
Before Surgery Day in mid-February, my massage therapist,
sweet Samantha, suggested I envision the hospital bathed in light, and call on my angels, not that winged beings must attend my
surgery, but that I should summon, through intention, a team of caregivers who would see my spirit and be guided to say and do all the right
things throughout my brief hospital stay. Because my dad had recently died, I
believed that wherever he was, perhaps he had a magical, saintly power to intercede
on my behalf so I called on him, too. I arrived at the hospital at 8:30,
surgery lasted 1.5 hours, and I was home by 3 p.m.
During surgery prep, I had
lovely conversations with nurses. I shared jokes with the surgery team before I
passed out cold (never have I conked out like I did on whatever that dreamy anesthesiologist
shot into my veins.) As the nurse came
to fetch me and my gurney for the ride down to the operating
room, I sensed the temperature drop. Cold. Why? Oh yeah, because cold minimizes germ-age. Don’t they keep the morgue
cold, too? I wondered if I was somewhere near the cadavers. My dad’s death had
strangely desensitized me toward the morose aspects of mortality. My destination was otherworldly, hospital limbo. I was in a holding pattern where the surgeon would
cut the skin on the outer part of my head, drill away the bone on my skull, remove
whatever was growing inside, and replace the destroyed bone with a titanium
plate while I temporarily ceased to exist, no awareness, no dream-state. I admit
that I love saying that I have a titanium plate in my head. It’s usually where
I insert “ do you believe this shit?” I
never saw it coming. Of all the things to worry about, a head lesion wasn’t on the list. There are so many things that can go wrong with the human body, I simply
hadn’t visited this particular possibility.
Post-surgery, I played the good Catholic girl routine. No
complaining, yes I feel fine, no I don’t need anything, and when asked was I
ready to go home – I jumped off the cot like a 10-year-old, swiftly and surely
pulling my clothes on, making jokes all the while. “I just went in to pee, and
it was like Michael Myers in Austin Powers – it took forever and I never seemed
to be done!” We all laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. Nothing was,
because with bone biopsies, a patient can wait up to three weeks for the
results. I left the hospital still not knowing if the lesion was a malignancy.
During those first days at home, I barely wanted to leave
the sofa due to post-anesthesia syndrome, read: extraordinarily exhausted, and
I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror because I was not permitted to
wash my hair and I’m a “wash your hair every day girl,” have been since high
school. Oiled with anti-bacterial goop to one side like a giant comb-over, only
a strip of my hair had been shaved, artfully created to be hidden beneath the
longer hair on top. That was depressing
enough; but my heart pounded every time the phone rang with the display
indicating a mysterious phone number. “Oh my God, it’s the doctor’s office,” my
teeth chattered. It would turn out to be a sales person or someone confirming
my dental appointment.
March 5th, almost Spring, and my follow-up
appointment day with Dr. Z. The expected “results” phone call had never come.
Was he waiting until my appointment so that he could give me my diagnosis
face-to-face with my husband there to support me when my legs buckled after
hearing the bad news? Or maybe he wanted to give me the good news in person to boost
his already huge (I assume) surgeon-like ego. Come on, doc, spit it out.
“It’s a meningioma.”(For a moment, my husband thought that meant cancer.) But I remembered my etymology and knew “oma” means “tumor,” and I had read about meningioma’s. Mary Tyler Moore had
one. Sheryl Crow has one. The doctor added, “Benign.”
Cool, I’m okay. I
felt like the heroine in a Lifetime Channel movie. Charlie and I pressed our arms up against
each other in silent glee, and I offered a quiet nod to my dad and the angels.
