Grey Matter, The Tiniest of Silver Linings
My mother has open brain surgery on October 30th. I don’t think she’d mind my mentioning this, as long as I also add a clause about her being “totally at peace” about the whole thing. Needless to say, no one else in the family has cosigned that particular statement. Luckily for everyone, things shook out this summer in such a way that my parents were able to see all of their children and grandchildren prior to the surgery without endangering anyone’s health, so if the worst should happen (and it won’t––I trust neurosurgeons a lot more than I trust myself) there would have been that final tour. Nobody is ready to use words like final or death or even to a lesser extent irreparable nerve damage in conversation, but you can be sure that we are thinking them. All the time.
The wonderful thing about my family (one of the wonderful things, I should say) is that we are all obsessed with research and preparation. No sooner had Mum announced the detection of her unwelcome (but thankfully slow-growing) visitor than my sisters and I were deep in the madness that lies between search results on Google and snarled in the paywall blocking almost every academic article on the subject of acoustic neuromas. And with a surplus of information in hand, we piled up detail after detail as if that would give us an emotional leg up on the situation. And in a way … it did.
I’m no Cersei Lannister; I think there’s rather a lot to the saying “knowledge is power,” if only power over the self and the psyche. What’s understandable, comprehendible, known––it holds less power than the blind thunder of emotions rattling around in the void. So. We now know all of the little ways in which open brain surgery can go wrong, and all of the big ways it can go right. Even though I’m never going to be copacetic about a scalpel near my mother’s brain stem (why yes, the tumor is in fact large enough to go from acoustic nerve to brain stem), I am for some reason even less chill about the possibility that the surgical team will only be able to remove portions of the tumor and will have to follow up with what’s rather sexily called “Gamma Knife” intervention. I’ve been obsessed with radiation ever since I can remember, and my more recent reading obsessions have given me even less confidence that the most damaging of all radiations––gamma radiation––should be going anywhere near my mother’s brain.
No thank you.
That said, for the first brain tumor I can remember popping up in my family tree, this is rather a gentle introduction. It feels somehow appropriate that after my grandmother’s death in 2014, and the sudden but deeply relieving disappearance of any and all stigmas surrounding conversations about health, that we would continue our baby steps from not talking at all about mental health and neurodivergence to acknowledging and affirming its existence and impact on daily life, to freely and openly discussing the family tendency towards depression (I come by it honestly), to taking on the next challenge relating to the brain.
My mother is also something of a student of neuroplasticity. She has the other family tendency of checking out enormous stacks of library books on a subject as well, so she’s been accumulating a fair bit of data on the brain, its workings, and its ability to recover from physical trauma. She experienced a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in the early 1970s when her family’s car was crushed beneath a speeding semi-truck in the midst of a snow storm in rural Saskatchewan, and I can’t help but wonder over the fact that it is her, the one who has already had to grapple for decades with brain damage, who is now confronted with brain surgery later this month. Her personal experience, as well as her interest in the subject, as well as her research into it for work, has put all of the many tools (power tools?) into her hands to allow her to cope with this situation better than her children are. After all, her children’s obsessions include radiation in space, radiation in the Ukraine and Japan, downwinders, and the impacts of TBIs on long- and short-term memory. Okay, fine. Those are all my obsessions. I’m pretty sure my sisters are more interested in true crime, literary fiction, and mastering the art of parenting high-energy children.
I have very little to add on this subject other than a general but extensive rant about the many unexpected gifts bestowed upon the world in 2020, and I’ll forego tormenting you with what is now quite the list of personal and national and global calamities. I would make a reference to Moses and the ten plagues of Egypt, but I don’t want to give the Yellowstone super volcano or red algae any ideas. Mum will be in hospital for at least five days, and I am only one long day’s drive away from Denver, so this is one family calamity I can actually do something about.
In the meantime, my job hunt continues, slowly, and with a deepening conviction that this was the right time, and the right year, to be opening my life up to change. Had I been pulled into a job before this surgery, I would not have been free to pack my go bag and cat and practice developing a bedside manner marginally more congenial than Bones’ in Star Trek. I would not have been emotionally capable of riding out this roller coaster of a month had I not taken a couple of months to dig in the dirt, grow some beets, and figure out who I am if I’m not a Youth Services Librarian. The season between departing the library in July and learning the surgery news in early October has been one of the most rewarding of my life. I’ve housesat for some chickens, helped tidy up a couple of pastures, gone camping with my cat, kicked back with friends in the sunshine, and enjoyed seeing a garden through from seed to harvest. The last of the season’s tomatoes are hanging in the garage to ripen and the last of the sunflowers are coming down tomorrow.
As far as Sputnik is concerned, taking a moment to simply sit around with her and check in with her furry self has led to a couple of medical revelations that have turned her into a shockingly energetic five-year-old kitty. Know how to detect dental disease in your animal friends, is all I’m saying. And experiment with their diet a little! Ever since I introduced wet food and high-quality kibble from the health food store, Sputnik has refused to eat the old stuff she’d been okay with for five years. Now she’s on something like a half-and-half diet, and her water intake has more than doubled. She’s hydrated, energized, pain-free, and as far as I can tell, happy. And you know what? Happiness is infectious, and I’ve been witness to so much happiness this year, even in the midst of … well, everything. And when I can help fix something, even if it’s a tiny little thing like optimizing my cat’s diet, it gives me hope that I can face the bigger challenges, too. Be there for my Mum. Land my dream job. Actually finish watching all the Star Trek series. Chase happiness. Those kinds of things.
Mum’s definitely a Ravenclaw. And I’m 100% Slytherin. Can’t you tell?
