Bad 80′s Television
So yesterday I head down to the neurologist’s office to pick up some samples of a new medication he wanted me to try for my headaches. I mentioned that the results hadn’t been in for the MRI yet on Wednesday, so they went hunting for them, and there they were finally. The doctor went to look at them, then came out, and I felt like I was in the middle of one of those really bad 80′s medical shows. You know, where they are smiling in the face of the patient, while in the background everyone is scrambling to find the surgeons.
OK, maybe I am being melodramatic, but the whole atmosphere really kind of freaked me out. He comes out of the office, with his hands up in a placating manner, smiling, saying, “It’s just as I thought, don’t worry, it’s completely benign, completely benign!” Yet not saying what ‘it’ really WAS. Trying to reassure or convince me? Or himself? Because I am not quite sure how you could tell whether something is benign just by looking at a picture of it. You know, without a biopsy. But then, maybe that’s why I am not a neurologist.
The scoop? I have a mass growing inside my brain. 2 centimeters in diameter, according to the report. I only got a brief look at the report, and I was a bit too shaken up to think of asking for a copy, so I am still pretty much in the dark about everything, except for registering that he was saying that I needed to see the neurosurgeon within the next few weeks at the latest. And for me not to worry. Easy enough for someone else to say, I suppose. They don’t have some strange thing that they don’t even know what it really is yet growing inside their brain, the very thing that allows them to function, and to even write on this web page.
I am REALLY REALLY trying to stay positive. Take it one day at a time. To not lose myself in a “why me?” diatribe. But I feel as if I am at one end of a long long tunnel, and everyone else is at the other end, and no matter how hard I try, no matter how fast I run, I still can’t reach that other end. I can’t reach the place where the ‘normal’ people are. I feel completely alone. I know people are THERE, and I want to reach out to them, I really do. I want to feel less alone. I want my mind to stop feeling as though it were full of cotton stuffed with a million buzzing angry bees, all trying to get out of my head at once. I want this whole thing to just STOP.
