What My Brain Has Taught Me (eBook)

Chapter One

Before Brain Surgery (BBS)

My Brain This Side of Life Or

It’s All In Your Head

Starts with a “B” * October 19, 1989

Kenny and I woke with excitement in our hearts as this was the day, October 19, 1989, that finally, after six years of diagnostic testing and surgeries, we just may have answers to our baby making journey. So, we felt assured he need not be with me for the last of testing that day. As his sister, Jeanne, was visiting from Florida and she and I were close, she traveled with me to the hospital for what we thought would be an effortless day with reason to celebrate by days end. Following a check-it-off-the-list testing procedure called HSG—Major Ouch!— she assisted me down the hallway to the MRI capsule like a Girl Scout helping an old lady cross the street.

Why an MRI? It was a fact, my prolactin level (a hormone released from the anterior pituitary gland that stimulates milk production after childbirth) was high enough I could be the official neighborhood wet nurse. Our beloved Endocrinologist Reproductive Specialist, Dr. Christos Mastroyannis, felt an MRI was in order checking for the possibility of a pituitary tumor, which, as he stated, is a relatively simple fix. All right let’s go for it and get on with making mine and Kenny’s babies.

So, relieved to be lying down after my morning procedure, I was slipped into the capsule. I sighed a big sigh, thinking; I’m clueless as to what is happening, but it can’t be any weirder than what I have already been through. And this is it! We will have all our answers very soon. The alien noise began, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud as visions of National Geographic Hooters Women danced in my head to the rhythm of the magnetic drumming. After what seemed a very long time the tech came bustling in grabbing my right arm as the capsule bed slid out toward him and with a syringe the size of Manhattan said, “You’ve got something in there. Something in your head.” He shot me with some orange goo and hurled the rolling table into reverse throwing me back into what seemed like something akin to a NASA Space Capsule now ready for blast off. My thought regarding his electrified comment; “You’ve got something in there.” OK, one would hope. Of course, I have something in there. It’s called a brain! My choices here are to panic or relax into the idea that I have more time all to myself for meditation. I chose the latter.

When he pulled me out, I became wrapped in the entire night’s bizarre episode of “Excuse me? Say what? This can’t be true!” Before my jelly-like legs had rounded the table’s edge, before my near numb feet touched the floor, this crazy man was saying; “You have a brain tumor and we’ve got to get it out right now.” Well, that just did not register even in the slightest. This guys a nut. Then I saw my sister-in- law’s face and became puzzled and frightened inside.

He rushed me out of the MRI room so fast, I barely had time to snatch her hand to come with me keeping me safe from this quack. He was just a little too stimulated and the situation a little too surreal for me as he took my hand bolting me into the reception area of the X-ray Department waiting room full of weary people. Sitting me down, throwing a woman’s magazine (I figured that because there was a woman baking cookies on the front cover) into my lap repeating over and over “Read something to me.” “Excuse me?” “Read! Read something now!”

This guy is totally freaking me out. I had come to the hospital that day for the last of the “baby questing” testing procedures thrilled by the idea that now Kenny and I would have our answers leading to our next step toward the direction of our baby in arms. Meanwhile this near hysterical man is telling me crazy things and demanding I read. Fear jolted through me unknown to anyone other than Kenny at the time. My inner guts just wanted to scream at him, I can’t read! Instead, I had to quickly be clever once again in life hiding shame while my outer demeanor was trying desperately to hold onto some semblance of reality. Looking up into his anxious eyes, doing my best to appear calm while closing the magazine, I quietly stated, “I’m sorry, you just told me I have a brain tumor (at which time everyone in the room turned and stared). I have no interest in reading to you.”

He hurriedly grabbed my wrist, again, as I tried to grab the phone off the receptionist desk saying, “I need to call my husband.” “There’s no time for that now. We have to get you into surgery.” I grabbed Jeanne’s hand, as he pushed his way past those waiting in line at the reception desk and into the Light Room where only doctors, nurses and doctors’ kids are allowed. Ahhh, now I get it. This guy thinks he has found something on my MRI. Not only did he actually see something on an MRI, which must be just a little exciting for him, but he found it in Dr. Alfred John Suraci’s, the Chief of Surgeons daughter’s head. He wants me to know he knows everything he has ever learned in school so I can tell Dad and he can show Dad how brilliant he is. Holy MRI! Why else would we be going deep into the secret inner sanctum where he throws a galaxy of semi-translucent images unlike anything I’d seen before up on the Light Boards. He said, “See! You have a brain tumor, and we need to get it out right now.” Oh, yea, I know what you’re looking at. Sure, I see it clearly now, of course. Everybody step back from the nut case. This is absolutely no way to treat a patient! Someone get him away from me! Someone save me!”

While in my frigid (which is no reference to our baby questing by the way), I still have not exhaled since you first seized my life stance, doctor faces that I knew well from visits in my parents’ home suddenly started appearing over the tops of their seclusion isolation cubicles. They too began to hold their breath. Oh, this is so not working for me. Easy day supposed to be an easy day.

Suddenly, and quite literally, I felt a Brilliance of Light Rays, much like the Chaplet of Divine Mercy painting, shine behind me, embracing every fiber of my Being. I turned to witness Dr. Christos busting through the door with a fused look of...