I get gamma knife radio surgery tomorrow. Stereotactic something or another. On the tumor that said “stable” on report after report. But then, a conscientious neurosurgeon, dare I say, a friend, cared enough to look, then look again. “I hate to say this, but it looks…fuller,” he said and he leaned back and pulled his […]
Hey, you. Remember me? I know, it’s been… a minute. Some things have changed, good things mostly, some hard things. I’ve lost people, and found some others. I’m a mom now, that’s pretty cool. Pretty all consuming and exhausting but oxygen providing. She is sustenance and love wrapped up in chubby little arms and a […]
This morning as I let my body sink into savasana after my yoga practice, I played a song by Brandi Carlile. Her powerful voice gently lulled me into the earth, and as I felt my body sink into a haphazard relaxation she sang, “I’m beginning to feel the years, but I’m going to be okay, […]
I haven’t written here in a while. I just stopped wanting to write about my health because it became something that was too big for me to put into words. The constant fear that I kept at bay through a careful maintenance of “fight or flight” mode slowly started to collapse around me. I also […]
On Friday it will have been 3 months since what was hopefully the last of many brain surgeries.While I am quietly hopeful at the thought of resolution, it is not easy for me to inhabit my skin, this body, or this world with this new news. While everyone acknowledges alongside me that this will be […]
I was doing great. I was upbeat, I was present, I think you could even have called me peppy for a bit. I was unphased by my 10th brain surgery (11th surgery overall). I was singing Jason Mraz’s “Everything is Sound,” and taking the uncertain and unwritten future as a reason to stay firmly in […]
The night before my official diagnosis with an acoustic neuroma I had an idea of what I had based on my sister (a doctor) and I’s amateur analysis of the MRI over the phone. She graciously told me what I had and told me not to worry and wait for the doctor to advise. I […]
I figured something out about myself. I’ve stayed, in a way, frozen to a version of myself. I used to think I was stuck in a protracted childhood because my tumor caused me to regress, but then I was like, mehhhhhhhh, that sounds like a lot of psychoanalytical pucky. But I knew I was stuck. […]
I may be sick, I may have pain, but I get to live in my life, however complicated that life may be. I get to do, I get to act, I get to love.
For the last hour I have endured severe pain. It is what I would describe to doctors as a ten out of ten. It makes me naseous and steals my spirit. It’s the saddest face on what I term the “happy face scale” that nurses give you when you’re laid up in the hospital. I […]
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