RIP Matilda....You May Not be Missed, But You Were Valuable

I had intended to start this blog series on February 1st, but I was apparently too busy doing something else and managed to miss my own self-imposed deadline.  Oh, well.  These things happen.  The reason that date is important is it marks two years from the date in 2012 that I went into my optometrist’s office with an appointment to get glasses.  While that may seem unremarkable, the events that began with that eye appointment were anything but.

I left his office with an appointment later that day with an ophthalmologist who described a condition called idiopathic intracranial hypertension, also known as pseudotumor cerebri, that causes tumor-like symptoms without the presence of an actual tumor.  This was likely what was causing the optic nerve swelling the other doctor had seen and I needed an MRI to rule out a real tumor.  On February 9th I had the MRI.  Twenty minutes later, as I was setting my purse down after arriving home from the imaging place, the phone rang.  “You need to get some health insurance.  It is a tumor, a very big one and it needs to come out as soon as possible.” While I am sure there were other words spoken during that conversation, I remember very few of them.  I do remember wondering what “big” meant in terms of a brain tumor.  

On Valentine’s Day 2012, a long two weeks since the I-Need-Glasses Appointment, I saw a neurosurgeon for the first time.  At that appointment, I learned what “big” meant:

     

One of the things in this picture is doing its own thing.  One of these things is definitely not like the others.  It was at this point that my brain (see above) fully accepted that I have a BRAIN TUMOR!  That thing is 6 cm from the back of my eyes to my pituitary gland. Apparently that ginormous thing had been squatting in my brain for years, possibly my entire life, growing slowly, and causing havoc in my frontal lobe (see almost every judgment call that I made prior to 2012).  

The tumor was eventually named Matilda, a moniker assigned by my aunt.  Matilda would stay with me for another seven weeks while I sorted out how to pay for an operation of this magnitude.  She would also prove to be the cause of great concern on the part of those around me.  

There are many things that I can list as thoughts that flew through my mind during those seven weeks, most of which centered on the attempt to obtain health insurance or what affect this situation would have on my children.  But what sticks with me most are two distinct things. One is that weeks before the I-Need-Glasses Appointment, my mother had straight up asked in an exasperated sort of way if I had a brain tumor or something because I was awfully pissy lately.   Can you say “foreshadowing”?  Two is that before I even walked into the optometrist’s office for the I-Need-Glasses Appointment, I already knew that I had a brain problem.  I knew it before the MRI and I definitely knew it as I left the imaging place.  And I knew it when the phone started ringing when I got home that day.

I knew it.  But I didn’t accept it.  Not until the picture was presented to me.  It was then that I fully accepted it.  But somehow I knew it all along.  The tumor taught me many things, some of which I will address here in later posts, but the first thing I learned is that my own intuition, whether squished by tumor or not, is a powerful tool.  It quietly prepared me for what should have been the most frightening event in my life, allowing me the time to prepare mentally so that I would not despair.

I like to think that I faced Matilda with grace and with a constant smile.  And I did it, not because I possess a ton of grace, or because I was happy about the tumor, but because I already knew it was coming.  Somehow I just knew.