A Year of Change
Around this time last year, I was lying in my hospital room, waiting for a team to start prepping me for brain surgery. Everything started around 6:00 am with a medical team swarming my bedside, moving me to a pre-op and then an operating room.
A neurosurgery fellow talked to me right before the procedure. I never saw the lead neurosurgeon that day (though he checked on me daily after that). I'd already been put under by the time he entered the operating room. The fellow was tasked with the final run-through of pre-op questions.
By that point, I was nearly paralyzed with fear. I knew that within minutes, I'd be put under and wake up a different person in unknown ways. The fellow said, "I know this is scary to you, but we do this all the time. We're very good at this." For whatever reason, that brought me a lot of comfort in those final moments.
I've been eyeing this date on the calendar for weeks, remembering how I felt in the weeks leading up to surgery. Yet somehow, the actual day snuck up on me. I had a follow-up appointment with the neuro-ophthalmologist yesterday and said, "Surgery was about a year ago" without realizing that was only one day off from being exactly one year ago.
I no longer have double vision, and the ophthalmologist will work to decrease the prism in my glasses prescription until I can wear normal glasses again (a process that might take 6+ months).
The only truly lingering effect is slight facial paralysis. I feel it every second of every day – my face just doesn't move the way it used to. I'm sure to most people, it looks fine (maybe a slightly crooked smile).
But it's a night-and-day difference from those first few days, weeks, and months post-surgery. If I emerged with everything intact except some face muscles, that's the best outcome I could have hoped for.
The ordeal would have been exponentially harder without the people in my life who provided support — everything from meals to helping with the kids to being a shoulder to cry on.
It's not "over" since I'll still have monitoring for years (and possibly radiation on the remaining tumor at some point), but the difficult part is definitely in the rearview mirror.
Anna Burgess Yang