The thing about being in the midst of these types of traumas is that you're always wishing you could just put your life in rewind and back up behind the stop sign before the crash that left you totaled. Or click the key that restores the system back to the time before the computer crashed. That frustration and anger comes from being unable to regain that which you've lost, or are losing.

It's the finality of that thing, that moment, that is so devastating. There's that lingering feeling, sometimes for years to follow, a desire to wake up from the nightmare.

Tim and I got our wake-up call today when the neurosurgeon walked us back to his office to take a look at the MRI results.

"I don't think I really want to see the scans, if that' s alright with you," I said.

"No," Dr. Chen said. "You really need to see this."

I don't like medical things. Bone x-rays give me the heebie-jeebies. I had no desire to look at a close-up of Tim's brain.

Dr. Chen pulled it up on the computer screen anyway. I stood about four feet away.

"This is shot of your brain from the front," he said. I glanced at it quickly and saw the holes of Tim's eyes and nose. Gross. I looked away.

"And this is a look from the top down."

He showed us an etch-a-sketch of gray matter. Both halves were there, intact. A marble-sized hole was on the right side.

"We compare sides," Chen said. "You can see that the cyst is here."

Then he pulled up a front view.

"This is a view from between the eyes. And this is the pitutary. You can see there's no mass there."

"No mass?" I asked.

"No," he said. "There's no tumor there. There's no tumor anywhere. There's just this cyst but there's no sign of malignancy at all."

"That's great!" I said. Tim was grinning ear-to-ear.

"Of course, we'll want to watch the cyst. Check for any changes over time. Have you ever traveled out of the country?"

Turns out that Chen thinks the cyst is the result of a parasite that Tim may have picked up on his travels to South America -- his most recent trip there was 4 years ago. But it may be the result of a parasite he got when his parents were missionaries.

But what about the seizures? What caused them?

"Not sure, yet," Chen said. "Lots of people have seizures for no known reason."

He recommended Tim stay on the anti-seizure meds for a while. And a follow-up MRI in 4 months, to be sure that the cyst isn't growing. 

But there is no brain  tumor. There never was a brain tumor.

I am both incredibly thankful, relieved and joyous. A reprieve. A grace. A mercy.

The chance to wake up from the nightmare.

Only to realize your whole life has changed anyway.

OHMGosh, did I call my children on Monday night to tell them their daddy had a brain tumor? Did I fight back tears when I heard them weeping? Did my heart skip beats from the stress of having to tell my husband's mother that her son was diagnosed with a brain tumor?

Did I get sick to my stomach to have to tell my boss in North Carolina that I wasn't coming back because, well, it was so much worse than we imagined. That Tim had a brain tumor, that he couldn't drive for six months at least, and that it would require surgery, maybe radiation.

Night after sleepless night, worrying about the car at the airport, the belongings at the loft. Did I really interrupt my life to take care of a tumor that, praise God, doesn't exist? What about Rebekah, bless her heart, spending all day packing up my loft and Jessie who loaded up a van and drove all that stuff all the way to Williamsburg, VA because well that's what a good neighbor does for another in need.

And the emails and phone calls and the prayers of hundreds... I can barely process it all.

I didn't mention it to Dr. Chen. We just thanked him. Told him it was great, great news, thank you so very, very much.

I haven't felt this relieved and this dismayed since my 14-year-old son stayed out past 2 a..m and I had to go in search of him. I found him safe among friends, but I feared him harmed. I wanted to hug him tightly and never let him out of the house again. But I also wanted to beat the everloving daylights out of him for disrepecting me and causing me needless worry.

"Hi, I'm Dr. Serrano and so you have a brain tumor" is about to learn the discipline of medical malpractice.

 

  

 

Where's Your Jesus Now? has garnered some other attention as of late. There's this review in yesterday's Charleston's Post & Courier

http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A55836

 

And for all you music & book lovers, PASTE magazine has given WYJN a commendable rating in this month's issue. Here's my fav part of the review:

"Zacharias offers a potent rebuttal to the contemporary commentary that only the stupid can be religious and that intelligence beats faith every time."

 

If Tim’s the one with the brain tumor, why am I the one suffering the headaches? A constant dull underwater sort of headache. The kind you get from driving a cement mixer around all day long, I suspect.

There is this whole entire year of my childhood that I cannot remember. It was my fourth-grade year. I remember the first few days of it, the way the other students at Rogersville Elementary poked each other and pointed at me, then whispered, “She’s the one. Her and her brother.” It wasn’t long after that first week of school that we left Tennessee and moved off to Georgia. From there I cannot recall the rest of that entire school year of 1966-1967.

Forgetting stuff isn’t always the curse we make it out to be. I’d be perfectly happy to forget some of the useless stuff I remember. But, of course, if a person did that, they’d run the risk of forgetting really useful stuff, like Social Security numbers or home addresses, or John 3: 16.  

I had this fleeting moment of panic yesterday when Cory, the Toyota man, asked Tim for some number. Tim paused half-a-second and then recited it. Long ago I memorized my Social Security number and his. A spouse needs to know these things.

When we drove off the car lot in the new car I had been imploring Tim to get for the past two years because his vehicle resembled something off the car lot in Baghdad, I said, “This changes everything.”

Before we signed the papers on Rav 4, the salesman took the time to read to us the statement about how the insurance doesn’t cover pre-existing medical conditions.

In a matter of a few days my husband went from being the picture of perfect health – the guy everyone envied because he looked 20 years younger than his actual age – to being the guy in perfect health with the brain tumor. 

He will never ever again have a clean bill of health, even should he live to be 120 and with Tim’s family history that’s entirely possible.

The knowing of that makes me nauseated.

“How are you doing?” Mama asked last night. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to her since all this darkness tumbled out of that doctor’s cavernous mouth.

Telling the kids was hard enough, although they’ve been troopers about it. The girls will start to tell me something about their day, some frustration and they’ll stop themselves and say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know that.”

What they mean is that I have enough to worry about, and they don’t want to burden me with tedious stories about their daily lives. Stephan, who is by default or by nature or by training usually more negative than his sisters, hasn’t said one negative thing through all of this, other than, tell me what you need me to do, Mom.

What I need him to do is drive to RDU airport and hunt down my car, that BMW with the GPS that Brent’s daddy bought me because he worried about me getting lost on the road during all my travels.

“Did you have a premonition of any of this?” my girlfriend Patti Callahan Henry asked on Tuesday when I told her about Tim. I’d stayed with Patti in Atlanta recently and we’d talked for hours about dreams and premonitions.

“No,” I said. “I just had this one moment walking thorough the airport parking garage when I wondered, what happens when people suffer heart attacks on the airplanes? Who gets their car? How do they find it? What happened during Katrina? Who picked up all those cars in those parking lots?”

But that wasn’t a premonition about Tim. That was a random thought about cars being misplaced from their owners. Stephan is going to pickup the car tonight. I hope he doesn’t have to spend a couple of hours roaming through the parking garage trying to find it.

“I’m tired,” I told Mama when she asked how I was feeling.  

I didn’t tell her that I feel like I’ve been jerked up hard and tossed from one end of the nation to the other. I didn’t say that what I feel is slapped down.

I was going to Williamsburg this weekend to see the Grand Illumination. I was going to go doll shopping, not car shopping. I’d taken two Angels off the giving tree at work. I’d purposely picked the angels with the request for dolls just so I could loiter among the pink boxes in the toy aisle. I barely got to use the up-front parking space at work that I’d won in a drawing of United Way givers. It just sits empty, I suppose, waiting for me to pull up in my Beamer. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone in Fayetteville. I didn’t get to shake their hands or hug them and tell them what a pleasure it had been to work ohsobriefly in the best job of my life. I didn’t get to pack up my desk, or my apartment.

Rebekah Sanderlin did that for me.

She’s a military wife and journalist who first welcomed me to town. Rebekah and I would meet for lunch, and she would school me about the community. Her husband is in Afghanistan. Her daughter Rudy was born the night that Hurricane Hanna blew ashore.

Nobody knows how to pack better than a military wife.

She called a few friends together and they spent the day packing up my apartment. She even took down my bed for me. I was worried about my research books. The white notebooks full of cop reports and interviews for the true crime story I’d just finished and shipped off to the agent.

As a journalist, I knew Rebekah would treat those notebooks with respect.

“I was almost afraid to touch them,” she told me later.

She took the Angels.

“I was going to go by the office and get some anyway,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

That’s the stuff you can’t risk forgetting – the many kindnesses that strangers and friends alike extend during jarring moments like these.

Jesse called me. He’s the other loft dweller. Rebekah had slipped a note under his door asking him to call because I didn’t have his number. Jesse is going to pack up his truck with my stuff and drive the load to Williamsburg, Va., to Stephan’s place.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jesse said. “I love being able to help.”

He’s not just saying that. Jesse really means it. “If I’m not helping someone, I’m just sitting around drinking beer.”

“When are you leaving for Afghanistan?” I asked.

“Next week,’ Jesse said.

“When you get back you have to come see me in Oregon.”

“Okay,” he said.

All the boxes of my personal stuff will be shipped to me, courtesy of Good Shepherd Hospital, who made that generous offer during our meeting yesterday morning. A peer review will follow for the issues I raised in our cordial and productive meeting.

Meanwhile, Dr. Earl, the family doctor, got us a consultation with Dr. Timothy Chen at Portland’s Emmanuel Hospital. We are off to that this morning in the new Toyota, not in one of those battle heaps Tim had been driving.

“I finally get a new car and I can’t even drive it,” Tim said.

Charlie called from Boston, worried about Tim, but not because of the brain tumor, but because of my driving.

“Tell Tim he needs to make sure he’s wearing a football helmet and a cup,” Charlie advised.

Everybody’s a comic.

Except me.

I’m the chauffeur aka medical secretary.