(this is the) First Day of My Life

NOTE:  Written in April 2010 on my first blog.  Transferring here.

I left off at:  "Get your asses to Dell Children's Hospital now."  Well, that's not exactly what the doc said but it is what he was saying.  So that's what we did. 

But before that...  I was standing in the kitchen.  Julian had had his MRI earlier that morning and I was back at the house, trying to start the packing process.  This day was a Tuesday and I only had til Saturday to "vacate" the house.  The house I helped plan, paint, tile, whatever.  The house in which my new husband and I would start our life together.  (That whole marriage-forever-love-promise-disaster all came tumbling down in a loud hurry not even six months after the wedding.  Because he's the yellowest-bellied coward I ever met (and went on to marry).  Any post you find here about it is TAME compared to how I truly feel about that wretched creature.  Ahem, moving on.) 

Where are we?  Yes!  Wandering around, thinking about boxing up the things I hadn't even finished unpacking.  I couldn't concentrate, though.  I hadn't been able to concentrate for months.  Of course, I wrote it all off as the effects of what was becoming a particularly nasty divorce.  I had been walking around inside my life with a strong, unshakable feeling that something big and bad was gonna happen.  When the hearing for temporary orders happened on that Friday before, February 19th, and it went so terribly, I told myself that the hearing was the bad thing.  But the feeling only grew.  I had been dragging hard.  I'd be walking across campus and get nearly knocked down by this huge thing.  I mean, to the observer, I would've looked like some chick with a backpack who'd gone bonkers.  I just stopped, mid-step, and wept like never before.  It was like gastroenteritis, but of the soul.  This happened a couple times before the hearing even happened.  What I'm trying to say is that I had an unshakable and unmistakable feeling that something was coming.  Have you ever felt this?  You can't miss it; you know it if you've ever experienced it.  There is no "um..." about it.

Now, let's go back to the kitchen.  I had been on the phone with another mom from my son's class.  They were to be released early that day due to the snow.  I missed the pediatrician during that call.  He left a message.  He didn't say anything other than he had the MRI study and to give him a call back.  But I knew.  I knew he had hard news to give me; that there was some shit on that MRI.  I think I first began howling after I heard his voicemail.  I called him, he was out to lunch.  I told the answering service lady I couldn't wait an hour to talk to the doc, so, yes--page him.  I howled some more.  I stopped.  I know I was talking to myself, nonsense.  I talked myself into pouring a glass of water and almost heaved as soon as the water touched my tongue.  Nope.  Ok, try doing the dishes.  Walk over here.  NO, wash the dishes, do something that's not nothing.  You can't do nothing so do something.  Yeah, it really went like that.  Out loud.  In my anxiety, some of my extremities and lips went numb.  I do that.  I actually go numb when I get nervous enough.  The phone rang and that conversation is a blur.  I remember how solid his voice was, though, and the things he said that will forever be remembered in bold.  I imagine his words in the shapes of squares and rectangles, there were no curves on anything he told me.  Due to the size of one of the arachnoid cysts, we needed to go in to the hospital.  You mean now?  Yes.  Wait, you said one of..  Yes, there are two, one is large enough to be an immediate concern.  They know you're coming, check in at the ER.  Howls.  More and more howls.  For what would be the last time in my life, with only my bag on my shoulder and my phone against my ear, I left that House.           

I drove, somehow, to pick Julian up at school.  The doc stayed on the phone with me.  I opened the door a couple times, thinking I was going to puke.  I didn't.  But, God, my body reacted.  I have never ever in my life been so stretched.  I can only try and fail to describe how I felt.  Perhaps like an out of body experience endured in my body.   When I parked and walked up to the school on my numb legs, I saw Julian's teacher.  She knew I was wrecked, I'm sure, by the look on my face.  I put my hands on her shoulders when I told her they'd found a big cyst and we had to go right then, partly for physical balance and partly because I needed for someone else to share the gravity of the news with me, immediately.  I was buckling hard under the knowledge and the solitude.  We were standing in a crowd of happy, goofy elementary kids running around in their afterschool freedom.  Over her shoulder, I saw Julian laughing with one of his friends and another wave hit me.  She took me to a conference room where I tried to reach Julian's dad who was vacationing in Brazil.  No luck, he was out on a boat, no way to reach him.  I had already called my mom and Julian's paternal grandparents.  They were coming from San Antonio.  I remember the snow so clearly that day.  It delighted me that morning driving Julian to school but now it was surreal and gross.  Don't snow today, don't snow.  Be like a regular day, don't be special.  Stop fucking snowing. 

That was the most difficult car ride of my life.  I started out in the backseat to sit with Julian, to whom I was explaining in super kid-friendly ways, that we were gonna go see a doctor who was going to free him of this kind of water balloon just inside his noggin that was crowding his noodles.  I gave them personalities, his brain and the cyst.  I sort of acted out a kind of "hey, man, quit pushin' on me" mime for him.  He giggled.  God, love hurts unbearably sometimes.  I wanted to hold him and wrap around him.  I wanted to swallow him whole and put him back inside my body where I could feel like he was safe.  When I couldn't bear either my mind or my body any longer, we pulled over and rearranged.  I had to drive to DO something.  I couldn't sit and chat with Julian anymore.  I was such a wreck.  

We finally got to the ER and I gave the nice lady Julian's name.  Someone came and got us straight away.  We hung out in a room and Julian was looked at and talked to by a few different docs.  I met the neurosurgeon and we sat down to look at his MRI together.  Now see, I'm completely untrained; I'm only Dr. Mom, but when I saw those images...  I choked back once again the urge to hurl and I asked the doctor quite simply "Does he have a whole brain?"  That's how big the dark area on the scan was.  I mean,  from certain angles, it looked like he had more cyst than brain.  The doctor assured me that he does indeed have his whole brain.  This cyst almost certainly developed in utero and grew ever so slowly since.  That's the only explanation that is possible.  A cyst that size could not have grown rapidly without symptoms.  Dr. Lee  (our surgeon) was amazed Julian didn't have any of the common symptoms that go along with something like that.  But he said that with it's size it was going to start causing serious trouble at any time.  That was the reason for the rush.  We would have surgery the following day.  He'd have a craniotomy on the left side where the doc would drain and fenestrate the cyst.  That means they essentially shred and remove as much of the cyst's membrane as possible.  The more membrane you remove, the lesser the chance of regrowth.  If he found a safe entryway across the midline of the brain, he'd cross it and drain the smaller cyst Julian had in the right side of the skull.  I agreed to this, repeating that it was only if he felt quite safe crossing that midline.  Oh, and the midline.  Not in the middle at all.  My poor Junebug.  I later found out that his cyst was the biggest they've seen at Dell so far.  It was grapefruit-sized.  Go look at a grapefruit.  Yeah.    

I know I asked him a slew of questions and he sat with me and slowly answered every one with lots of eye contact.  When I got quiet, he asked me if I had any other questions.  I shook my head, but I'm sure my face asked the only question I really cared about:  Are you gonna do this right?  Can you do this?  He responded to the desperation he saw and said, "I've been doing this a long time and I'm a dad.  I have four kids."  And then he nodded.  I had entered an arena in which I had zero control.  I handed my trust and my boy over to this surgeon.  He is a remarkable one, at that.  Tremendously competent with bedside manner that makes you love him almost instantly.  Dr. Mark Lee.  God forbid you ever need a pediatric neurosurgeon, but should you-- Dr. Mark Lee and Dr. Timothy George at Dell Children's in Austin, Texas.         

I'm going to leave us here in the ER for now.

Look, I don't know you but thank you.  I'm writing this in such detail because I need to A. get it out and B. feel less alone.  I mean, Julian completely aside, the experience I had mentally, emotionally, physically just in the time between the pedi's voicemail and actually arriving at the ER...  I really physically felt like I was going to die.  It was so intense.  And there is so much more to tell before the story is over.  (It's actually not over, of course, we are still navigating many things.)  But, by the time Julian was released from the hospital, I was overdue for admittance myself.  They come every couple hours to treat your kid, scan him, medicate him, but they don't give you one single pill.  I don't know how I got through the hospital stay.  I've been haunted by the things I saw, things I heard, things I felt.  I think this retelling will help me work through it in a different way and wear some of the acute panic off of the memories.  So, again, thank you for being at the other end of the tin can phone cord. 

Much love,

Blargamel

PS:  An arachnoid cyst grows in one of the membranes between brain and skull.  This may be oversimplification but do you care?  Nah.  It's notable because while I was dying that there was something in my kid's skull, I was breathlessly grateful that it was a cyst between the bone and brain and not some tangled, messy thing deep within his brain tissue.  Breathlessly grateful.

Hallways and Corridors

NOTE:  Written in March 2010 on my first blog.  Transferring here.

 I haven't been by in ages.  I've thought about it many times but so much has happened since I last wrote--too much.  It feels like it oughtta be 2015 by now, at least.

In the name of telling a long story shortly, I'll keep to the meat of it.  My soon-to-be ex-husband got a nasty lawyer and had me and Julian thrown out of the house.  The hearing for temporary orders was on February 19th.  The judge gave us until Feb. 27th at 6:00 p.m. to be out.  I was asking to be allowed to stay until the school year was up.  I was in the middle of a 12-hour semester (and trying to figure out how/where to work part time) and Julian was in school, an art program, and registered for the local spring soccer team.  (I should mention here that the ex owns four other residences.  Yes, aside from the one Julian and I were living in; the one all three of us lived in before he took off.  It's also a good place to remind you that Julian and I left the home we had made in my grandmother's old house, with no option to return.)  That's pretty much all of that story.  Well, maybe not.  I may choose to bitch more about the other details, but it will be later because that sorry sack and this shitty divorce became the least important things in my life when, a few days later... 

February 23 changed everything. It was a Tuesday and it snowed, I'll never forget the day. That morning, Julian and I pulled over on the way back to his school from the imaging clinic in Austin where he had just had an MRI.  It was snowing!  It doesn't happen around here; the last and only time I've seen snow was in kindergarden, 1985.  We stopped and watched for a bit.  I took some video of it on my phone.  I dropped him off at school and went home to start packing. 

Two hours later, the pediatrician called and told me he was referring me to another doctor; a neurosurgeon.  I said no, no, no, no..  I don't know how many times or in how many pitches or in what range of volumes.  I said no.  And I meant it.  But it didn't work; my disapproval didn't change the story the MRI told.  "He has two arachnoid cysts on his brain, and because of the size of one of them, we you need to bring Julian into the hospital.  Today.  They're expecting you at the Dell Children's Hospital in Austin."

If you're a mom, you don't need me to even try to describe all the indescribable feelings that coursed through me, mercilessly, one after another and simultaneously--driving the inner chaos and fear and pleading into an agony that felt like it would split me wide open and spill all of me out onto the dirt.  What an incredibly maddening and visceral reaction my body and mind had. The doc stayed on the phone with me.  He knew I was all alone and what was going on in our lives.  He was just as afraid I'd split open as I was.  I drove and talked and cried and listened to every word, trying to achieve some shred of understanding about this crazy thing I'd never heard of nestled in my son's skull.  I remember telling to the pediatrician to tell me some good shit, even if it was bullshit, 'cause I needed some good shit right then.  I used those words.  God, I remember some of the pieces far too well for comfort.

When you have a story like this, you can hardly make the long story short.  It's all the details that matter then, that make the story.  It's the details that change your life, that ultimately change you.  And I need to include the details.  I need to include the moments I lived through, that Julian lived through, that I didn't know how I'd make through.  All those moments that I still don't know how I got through.  I need to tell them.  I decided it's the best therapy I'm going to get.  If I had insurance, I'd see counselor to help me with the after tremors.  Alas, there is no insurance card in my wallet.   

I'm tired now and need to study.  This is not a story I'm going to get out all at once.  It makes me shake to recall it.  But, I'm totally not gonna leave you hanging.  I'm not aiming for a suspense here.  Julian is home and he's quite good.  That's the last line of the story for you.  I will fill in the middle bits in manageable installments, whether they are read or not.  I imagine, lovely stranger, that you understand.

Nice Rack

I have been thinking about my boobs.  All chicks do, of course.  And I think far too many of us have a love/hate relationship with them.  I've also been thinking about all the thinking about my boobs.  What gives?

Well, when you're young and the boobs are new, it's just weirdness.  Totally foreign things on your body.  You've been in your body, just fine on your own for a good decade at least, and then it's like, What the hell are these?  And lots of, Really?  This is what you're going to look like??  You develop the foundation for your frown lines during this time.

Moving on.  You grow up and if you have a baby, then you do some serious thinking about your boobs.  Whether or not you choose to nurse, it's a heavy subject--figuratively and definitely literally.  Also, whether or not you nurse, there are ice packs involved.

Moving on.  You're older.  Not old, but certainly advanced enough to wish you had again those weirdo puberty boobs you hated so much then.  You look in the mirror and sigh a lot.

I hadn't realized until very recently how big a part my ta-tas are of my womanly identity.  I had been wishing they were a different size, different shape.  Specifically larger and up-er.  Wishing they didn't look so lazy, so National Geographic.  Wishing away that rogue hair.  Or two...

   

Well, fuck all that.  They have served me so well.  They've looked great in string bikinis and tank tops bustier babes can't get away with so much.  They've stayed out of the way when I run and curved a tight sweater just right for me.  These puppies nursed my child through his entire infancy and then some.  And they did it with minimal complaint.  They did their job so well that Promised Land was a nickname I came by honestly.  All of the magic and sweetness that is breastfeeding was an experience I was able to have because of these beauties.  And I am so grateful.  If they're a bit tired, man, to them I say, "take off your shoes, rest a spell."  They are technically retired now from their most earthly and organic of purposes.  But I don't look at them in disappointment anymore; I grew up out of that.  I hold them in a kind of reverence.

This is something like an ode to my breasts.  But it's an ode to yours, too.  And to your woman's.  To all with a set and to everyone who no longer has a set.  

Much love,

Mel


PS:  NO idea why all that first bit is in caps.  I feel strongly, but I mean, not CAPS strongly...