I guess this is time to practice being comfortable in the unknown and letting go of the story.
My entourage and I sat in the neurosurgeon’s office yesterday afternoon learning a great deal about these fascinating pictures of the brain. He used words like bifurcation and hydrocephalus, and pointed out little passageways and cranial nerves. It was truly amazing. I wrote a lot of words down but now when I try to look them up, I spelled most of them so incorrectly that my spell-check is permanently damaged.
Watching the doctor whirl through these images and explain the nooks and crannies was so cool. it was like being on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Then life would come into bitter-sharp focus and I would say to myself, “that’s MY brain and MY brain tumor he’s discussing,” and suddenly the lint on my sweatshirt was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen.
I would lean in, eyes wide open, and say, “wow, really, you can just remove the temporal part of the skull and stick a big needle right through the brain, scoop some of that tumor out, pop a drain in for that extra fluid, and close it back up?” That’s SO cool…. oh shit, that’s MY brain we are talking about. And then the list of risks, which I am not listing here, thank you very much.
This dude will present my case to his team of specialists when they meet again in two weeks.
Next step: meeting a Neuro-Oncologist on Monday (she’s coming in special for me on her day off!), schedule a full-body PET scan and spinal cord MRI. If this damn leach started anywhere else, then they can biopsy that spot first to see what it is and skip the whole big needle-through-my-brain part. Then again, that would also mean that I have a metastasizing cancer, which I’ve heard really sucks the big one. At any rate the neuro-onc will also present my case to her team. And… you know, more will be revealed…
So, I get to do my best to keep both feet and mind in today, and not hop on that future train. Right now, I am healthy, and the only thing hurting is my stupid sprained wrist! Damn, life is good, ya’ll!
Thanks for reading along.
Dawn
braintumorlife 
Rootin’ for you, Dawn!!
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LOVE that you have an entourage! It must be a surreal experience to be looking at your own brain and talking about it in the third person! Lint would seem very interesting to me to if it were me in your shoes!
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first of all lint IS fascinating… every time I clean out the lint filter I am amazed at what I find.
secondly… 😦
thirdly, “entourage”… 🙂
ugh, I had a similar experience watching an ultrasound of my heart once – suddenly the visible throbbing became visceral and it made me extremely nauseous and emotional like I was a parent getting my first fetal ultrasound or something. I can feel it sinking 2 inches just reading this.
Making friends with the unknown is really really hard. I found willful divine ignorance is sometimes easier – you sit and listen to everything they have to say very carefully; you weigh your options, you poll your entourage; and then you walk out of the office and by the time you push the button on the elevator you begin relishing how very little they really do know. It’s not the same as denial, its just being secure in the knowledge that you can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next by the sheer fact that it has happened yet. No one knows any better then you do – its a great equalizer. Its like suddenly all the stubbornness that has always vexed everyone around you and that knee-jerk contrarian nature you’ve struggled with all your life is suddenly an immensely useful talent.
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