WHK
SEATTLE – we have a problem …
No, Beth is not writing this entry. She asked that I write something…as she thought it would be important for people to understand what I went through. I’m not great at this and was reticent. It took me four weeks to put anything down on paper. Beth became impatient and asked me to “get it out”…that her blog was STUCK until I wrote something.
Beth had had symptoms that might be consistent with something amiss in her brain, vertigo mainly. After a battery of other tests, cardiology, anxiety, tilt table tests – all of which she passed, her doctor ordered an MRI. Beth went for that seemingly routine exam by herself Wednesday morning. I had marked “Beth’s MRI” on my calendar, but neither of us gave this exam any special thought or worry.
Beth called me mid-day to tell me that the neuro specialist had found a “something” in the MRI results. It wasn’t clear what the something was – maybe something minor from birth, maybe the remains from a bruise or fall, maybe something more serious. She was advised to come back for a follow up MRI in three months. When she described the findings to me she was upbeat and matter of fact. (I joked that maybe the something that they had found was the leftover bruising from when her brothers stuffed her into a small plastic football shaped toybox, padded with a blanket, and pushed her down their basement stairs.
Two days later at the insistence of our great friend Caren, Beth went back to the hospital and picked up two copies of the MRI and that evening we asked our friend Kristin, who is a radiologist, one of our closest friends, and neighbor, to please take a look the next day as a huge favor and let us know what she thinks.
When I got home that evening I opened the envelope that held the two copies of the MRI and beside them I found a short, written report. I didn’t understand any of the wording, which was mainly descriptive, until the last sentence. I forget the wording now, but it stated the following in layman’s terms – “Small mass…. Likely from a prior contusion or possible brain tumor.” The wording to describe the tumor was not that obvious. I had to look the expression up on Google, “glioma”, which I did privately. The meaning was very clear – brain tumor. Beth had not conveyed to me this possibility or perhaps no one mentioned the possibility to her!
She was upbeat and casual about the results. “No big deal. I’ll go back in a few months and do this again, and I’m sure they’ll find nothing.” I won’t say that I had a bad feeling, because Beth had told me that the indication was that this was likely a nothing, but the wording was very clear in opening the possibility of a brain tumor.
I didn’t tell her what I had learned from Google.
My private knowledge didn’t last long. By the next afternoon, as a result of Caren and Kristin’s efforts, we had a likely confirmation of a brain tumor.
We both still went away on Friday for the weekend. I don’t think I was being callous in taking the kids skiing. I think it was more that Beth didn’t want to miss a long-planned weekend trip with a great group of school girlfriends, and would also have the opportunity to tell her mom, who lives in Palm Springs during the winter months, in person. So there would be no cancelling of either trip. Throughout the weekend we texted to each other and shared stories of how much the children were enjoying their skiing and how goofy Beth’s friends were and the fun we were both having. We both knew that we were coming home Sunday for a Monday meeting with the neurologist that Beth had lined up,(thanks to Kristin and Christy) but we hardly thought of the possible outcomes.
Monday morning. Our Neurosurgeon came in, and got down to the discussion pretty quickly. Right away we heard the words “cancerous brain tumor”. Beth did not flinch. She pulled out her notebook and started asking question and taking notes on our mini-course on brain tumors. With the doctor we created an outcome tree. Tumor or not? If tumor, grade II or worse? We learned the names of all sorts of tumors – what were OK ones and what were bad ones.
I was feeling as if I was outside of my body, looking back at this scene. This cannot be happening. On the one hand I was thinking this is going to be nothing, it’ll be a benign tumor. But on the other hand I was feeling this could be happening. This could be a real, life-threatening brain tumor. Now I had an answer to what it feels like when a doctor tells you something really serious is going on in your body. Except it wasn’t my body. It was Beth’s. I wasn’t looking at her. I don’t recall if I even took her hand. To have done so might have given credence to the doctor’s words. I’m skeptical of people and experts. I’m not always right, and it’s likely not a good practice to treat car salesman and neurosurgeons with the same degree of scepticism. But, I was also thinking that this Dr guy was likely wrong and was scaring us with the worst case scenarios so that he had licences to treat us however he thought most prudent.
Combined with being a knee jerk sceptic I am also a delayer. So my feelings now were flitting between certainty that this guy didn’t know what he was talking about and was just trying to get our attention to then propose an unnecessary operation (as opposed to the “wait and watch” option and do quarterly MRI’s and see how the tumor grew and changed and impacted Beth), to deathly fear that in fact Beth’s tumor would be life-ending and that our two children would be left without the best mother possible, and that our wonderful foursome would be blown up forever, to thinking that even if any of these possibilities were true that we should just take some time, slow things down a bunch, look at other options.
My daydreaming and denial always comes smack into Beth’s personality, which while not exactly “action at any cost,” might be described as strong action and responses with strong conviction and determination for outcomes.
The neurosurgeon proposed a craniotomy. I countered with drilling a sample test hole. He proposed surgery in a week. Beth offered to hold off on the surgery until I returned in five weeks from a trip to Nepal. Finally I had a moment of clarity (you’ll see a similar ah ha again when I describe our trip to San Francisco): What did I know about any of this. I moved from delaying to denying to doing it. I’m ready to go – as soon as possible, I said. It was just going to be a bump from an old athletics accident anyways, or perhaps an infection that caused a white fuzzy image on the MRI. While the doctor was likely overreacting, I thought, it now seemed like an inevitable precaution to do the surgery.
Why Not Me 