One Year Later

On this day last year, around this time, I don't know what I was doing. Probably something similar to what I'm doing right now — which is thinking about starting dinner prep.

At 9:30 pm that night, I was lying in bed when a call came to my phone from an unknown number. It was my primary care provider. She told me that she had the results from a CT scan I'd had a few days before. There was a mass near my brain stem, and she told me that I needed to go to the ER.

I went to the ER alone. Ger could have gone with me. We could have left the kids home alone for a few hours — they were old enough. But then we'd have to wake them to tell them we were leaving, and I didn't want to freak them out.

A friend reminded me today that I'd been texting her from the ER. She tried to stay awake but eventually fell asleep. I remember texting several people that night, as a way to pass the time and try to distract myself, but everyone eventually fell asleep.

I didn't get the results of my MRI until around 2:30 am. It was a meningioma, a benign brain tumor, but it needed to be removed.

I only told a few people immediately after the diagnosis – my family and a few close friends. I wanted to wait until I had more information, and that took a bit of time. I had a neurosurgery consult a few days later, but then was referred to a specialist. I wanted to know for sure what the course of treatment would be.

It feels like a giant boomerang of a year. I was flung all the way toward the sky, hit the furthest point, and then came back again. The path up was the weeks from the diagnosis up until my surgery. That furthest point was the immediate weeks after my surgery. I had a lot of pain, couldn't see very well, and had balance issues. I was exhausted and had headaches.

But eventually, I started to heal. Within a few months, I could walk normally and had my energy back. I got prism glasses to correct my vision. Now, things are pretty close to normal. That has been the path back down.

I really didn't know what to expect in those early days, weeks, and months. Now it has been a year. I feel incredibly lucky, like I dodged a life-altering incident. Instead, it was more like a temporary detour.