Ten Months: What's On My Mind
An MRI is a surreal and disconcerting experience. It is also loud as fuck. I am given some stiff, ill-fitting headphones to cover my ears, and I will wish I had gone ahead and put in earplugs. It is reminiscent sometimes of early 2000s pop punk intros - droning, discordant, rhythmic - and then not. It almost makes me laugh, but I am supposed to be very still.
I am given contrast dye, and it only takes two times to get a needle into my vein. It has been better. It has been worse. My body trembles as though uncertain - the stress of loud noises and a needle digging around beneath the skin trying to dissipate. But I am okay.
Afterwards, we drive around while my body re-regulates. Even though I still have to wait for results, I feel calmer for having done something to get them.
I am told I will get results in 24-48 hours. I am very distracted in the meantime. I try not to be, but it is all I can think about.
This all started sometime around the end of June.
I went to the doctor for my annual visit but also to casually mention that there is some loss of sensation on the left side of my face. Function maintained, but a numbness spreading from my chin, to my lips, the roof of my mouth, my cheek, my forehead.
I don’t really want to know, but I also feel compelled to know. I wanted to procrastinate and explain it away as a new allergy or b-vitamin deficiency or a pinched nerve. But I don’t, because I have a baby now. I can’t ignore it and hope that it goes away because my little girl is depending on me to take care of basic shit like making sure the numbness in my face isn’t something serious. So I mention it.
The nurse practitioner was more concerned than I hoped she would be. She ordered bloodwork - all normal. No autoimmune signs, no vitamin deficiencies. So the next step was an MRI. I had never had an MRI before, or much of anything, really. I’m accustomed to showing up to whatever doctor it is, being told how healthy I am, and saying, “Thanks, I know, see you in three years!” with very few exceptions. I have been lucky.
I try not to think about it too much.
I try to be steady. Why react to something twice?
It’s scary, though. If I’m honest. And I’m trying to be.
The night before my MRI, my mind rockets back and forth between invalidating optimism and resigned terror.
It’s nothing! I probably don’t even need this appointment! I’m wasting everyone’s time being dramatic!
I’m going to die! I have months left to live. It has been a good life. Alas!
Anxiety twists my guts in knots, shooting electricity through my body, and so I heave my attention out of my body and into the phone, desperate to be distracted. I will need courage, but it feels like a finite resource, and I am saving it for the morning when I put on clothing without jewelry, kiss my daughter goodbye, and willingly get my brain scanned in a clanky tube.
So far, my only real symptom is the numbness, but since finding out I need an MRI, I have been scooping up the body’s idiosyncrasies at random, looking for signs.
I exhaust myself.
Before bed, my partner kisses me goodnight, and I think to myself that he is the most beautiful he has ever looked, and he smells the best he has ever smelled. A thousand moments flutter through my mind like so many love letters, and I feel so grateful for belonging.
My mother texts me asking how I’m doing.
“Anxious, but okay,” I say.
“Me too, honey. I’m choosing to believe it’s going to be okay,” she says back.
“Might as well.”
At 4:30PM exactly on Thursday afternoon, I get the call about MRI results.
It could be better. It could be worse.
I am told it is a cyst, likely benign, near the pons part of my brain - by the brainstem. It is more on the left, which explains why I am experiencing numbness on the left. The nurse practitioner insists that I do not have much to worry about, that she is not worried, and that I should be fine. She is referring me to a neurologist to go over the results in person and discuss recommendations.
I have to ask her to repeat what it’s called three times, because the words “cyst in your brain” are buzzing around like hornets in my cysty-brain. Epidermoid. Likely developed in-utero and with me all this time, only just now causing symptoms. But I’ll know more in a few weeks.
What follows is irreverent joking around (“Everyone has to be nice to me now.”), earnest tears, and holding tightly to my baby girl. Because of her, something like this is more terrifying than it ever could have been before. And because of her, I found out before it got any worse.
It is confusing when the body you love does something not good for itself - when it endangers your experience of your life by doing something weird. It’s like, what the hell? I thought we were cool.
The weekend proceeds in a restorative way, spent swimming in a lake - once while sprinkling rain, once during sunset - sharing meals with friends, and cuddling a baby. It helps, and I don’t notice the numbness so much. Hardly at all.
In an email exchange with my yoga therapy mentor, there is a discussion of kapha excess in the nervous system. My responsibility as I see it, while I wait for answers from a neurologist, is to adjust. Remove sugar (kapha-like), build healthy muscle tissue, practice breathwork and meditation, and move my attention away from junk-content (scrolling, which has exploded in frequency and duration since having a baby) and more toward faith (that I will be okay), gratitude (that I am okay), and love (for there is so much to love).
I have been considering the idea (not my own, but rather, presented to me through recent reading) that social media works and is addictive because it fills an attachment void (I have been somewhat isolated this year) while also protecting us from the vulnerability of true attachment (it’s real but not real).
And in truth, when someone expresses love and care for me, especially now, I am moved to tears. It is intensely vulnerable. It is also, maybe, a feeling of desperately wanting to surrender to that, to be taken care of - of grief and ecstatic relief, simultaneously, that I am not entirely self-sufficient - that I need help.
I need help.
I cannot fix this alone. I must surrender to the expertise of another. To the care of another. It was the hardest part of C-section recovery, and I had wanted to avoid it for a while.
It is very unsettling.
While also, now, being a source of… gladness?
How to even put it into words.
In the context of an eerily close encounter with my own mortality and the sacred endeavor of getting this little one launched into adulthood, a new mantra has emerged for me. I utter it in moments of frustration or discomfort, and it bolsters my courage or my calm, as needed.
“It doesn’t matter. She matters.”
That is the truth.
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