In November of
2007 I had just turned 21, had just learned how to surf, and had just been
epically dumped while travelling with my horrible boyfriend in Central America.
So there I was, backpack in one hand, second hand surfboard in the other, with
nothing but a tenuous grasp of the Spanish language and a growing sense of
dread to keep me afloat. The dread came from the fact that over the past few months
I’d been having some increasingly serious headaches. I was hesitant to call
them headaches, however, and I’d had migraines before, but what I was
experiencing was so axe-to-the-eyeballs painful they left me curled up in a
ball, whimpering on the floor. They would come without warning - I’d be walking
down the street and all of a sudden feel like someone had hit me in the eyes
with the narrow edge of a 2x4. I’d have to limp back to my hotel and just ride
out the pain while screaming my head off. It was seriously that bad. Tylenol,
Ibuprofen, alcohol, weed, even the legally obtained Nicaraguan diazepam
(Valium) didn’t have any effect at all. My ex, before he so graciously left,
used to get so mad when I would get them, saying how it was because I was dehydrated
and I was ruining everyone’s time by not taking care of myself. What a charmer!
By the end of October the headaches were
getting worse, and more frequent, so I cut my trip short and caught a flight
home a couple weeks before Christmas. I was so scared of getting a headache on
the flight and freaking everyone out and having the stewardesses think I was
turning into a werewolf or something with all the screaming and thrashing
around, that I took six valium beforehand in order to sleep through the 9 hour
flight. Thank GOD I slept, because the only thing I can think of that would be
worse than getting a headache on a plane would be being so god-almighty high on
valium on a plane that the air marshal shoots me cause they think the drooling,
staggering, babbling woman is a fucking zombie.
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| I just wanted the whole can of coke! |
So I found myself home again, and by this
point, I was having ten to fifteen of these headaches A DAY – I couldn’t go to
the movies, go out for drinks, visit friends, I couldn’t leave the house in
fear of getting one of these vicious headaches in public. So I break down one
day and call my sister, sobbing, and she took me to the emergency room where
after eighteen hours of drugging me to no effect, a CAT scan, a spinal tap, an
MRI and buckets of blood work, they tell me I have a brain tumour.
Seriously, it was a relief to get that
news. I wasn’t scared or upset, I was elated to finally figure out what the
fuck was wrong with me, and now we had a plan, and that plan was brain surgery.
The tumour wasn’t on my brain proper, it was actually on my pituitary gland
which lives right behind your eyeballs in it’s own little cave of wonders which
also houses your optic nerve, which is why my ‘headaches’ felt like someone
Freddy Kruegering their way out of my peepers. The tumour was about the size of
a quarter and they were apparently going to rip that little fucker out through
my nose, which I was 100% cool with because it wouldn’t involve shaving my head
and I had just finished growing my bangs out.
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| I giggle every time I read 'third ventricle' and I'm not sure why. |
Your
Body Will Fuck With Everyone’s Plans
So I go under,
and the surgery is supposed to take a breezy four hours (it ended up being ten),
and involves a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist shoving two
large tubes up both nostrils, one of which contains the instruments (scalpel,
scissors, forceps, bone drill… no, seriously, bone drill) and one of which is a
big old suction hose coupled with a endoscopic camera and a light, so they can
see what they’re cutting out or into or off. They cram these tubes that look
waaaay bigger than what could feasibly fit up someone’s honker into your head,
cut through your sinuses until they hit the outside wall of your skull, drill
into that, cut through ANOTHER sinus and then boom! Pituitary town. Unfortunately for all involved my sinuses
decided that homie don’t play that, and started to bleed like a motherfucker. MORE
unfortunate for everyone but most especially me, is no one noticed. That is,
not until my blood pressure dropped so fast that my anesthesiologist, the guy
in charge of monitoring my heart and level of consciousness, finally realized
that they had pumped almost all of my blood out of my body.
General
Anesthetic Is Whackadoo-Crazy
This is where
events take a fairly serious turn, for everyone except me, really, because I
was crazily unconscious. If you’ve never been given a general anesthetic let me
tell you the craziest thing about it is the fact that it’s the exact opposite
of sleeping. If you, say, take a nap, when you wake up you have a keen sense of
time having passed, you wake up wondering how long you were out. Under
anesthetic you wake up with the sensation that NO time, whatsoever, has passed,
and you wake up wondering why the fuck you’re in a different room and different
clothes and why you feel like a bag of shit all of a sudden.
Only
10-20% Of Near Death Experiences See A “White Light”
So I died. At
least that’s what they tell me. For 2 minutes and 14 seconds I had no pulse, no
respiration, and had CPR performed. When they regained a bit of a heartbeat
they defibrillated – the thing with the paddles - which is where the electrical
current stops your heart so that it can get it’s shit together and start
beating regularly again. So I’m dead, then not so dead, then not at all dead,
but still fucked up. They don’t know why I started bleeding so heavily to begin
with, but more importantly they don’t know where
I started bleeding. If it was my sinuses or nasal cavity, no big deal, but
if it was my brain, well brain hemorrhages cause all sorts of fucking trouble,
scary stuff like losing motor function, memory loss, basically brain damage.
So, while still unconscious, I get whisked away to a big MRI machine where they
perform something called a contrast MRI. They do this by cutting into my
femoral artery, I’m talking inches away from my lady parts, and feeding a big
metal catheter up the vein until it hits my brain, then they release a dye that
shows up on the MRI. If my brain is bleeding, the dye will pool there and give
it away – turns out my brain was fine, except for the fact that it belonged to
me, and my sinuses were the ones to blame and they were easily dealt with.
The hilarious thing, in hindsight, was the
fact that in order to get to my femoral artery, they had to shave half of my
pubic hair off, which wasn’t exactly part of the checklist of things they told
me to expect, post-surgery. So when I wake up, and am on so much morphine I
think I can see into the future, and start checking out all the tubes and
stitches and bandages I’m covered with only to discover that someone has gone
to the trouble of giving my vagina a Skrillex haircut, well, I freaked out a fair
bit.
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| It looked just like this, but less of a pussy. |
Morphine
Makes You A Better Person
So, now we’re
getting into the good bit, which is the recovery. They give you morphine when
you’re in recovery for brain surgery. And I don’t mean they give you a pump
where you can control your dose until a certain point, I mean they give you a
steady 24-7 drip of sweet, silly morphine. God that stuff is good. I know it
makes a lot of people sick, but all it made me was fucking awesome. I was in
such a good place on that stuff, I was the life of the party. My friend Lauren
came to see me every day and every day I’d act like it’d been years. Scream her
name when she came in – give her a huge hug - tell her about my pubes - all
while having fifteen different tubes running in and out of me and having two
giant tampons shoved up each nostril. I felt great. My favourite part was my
catheter – you never felt like you needed to pee, the catheter just took care
of it, shunting it through a huge tube that ran the length of my bed into a bag
they hung off the end of it. Morphine made it an amazing and hilarious event,
every time:
‘Mom! Dad! Look at the tube! I’M
PEEEEEING!!!’
Morphine
Makes You A Paranoid Schizophrenic
Morphine also
took me down some strange and terrifying paths, usually in the middle of the
night. I remember waking up once and having the distinct and clear idea that I
needed to leave, leave the room, leave the hospital, I just had to go home,
that very instant - so the nurses caught me ripping, and I mean RIPPING all my
lines out while trying to stand up. They had to actually tie me to the bed
until they could get my lines back in and dose me with a sedative.
I also have a very clear memory of a nurse
explaining what all the pills they were giving me each day were. Hospitals give
these pills to everyone, and they’re mostly antibiotics to stave off infection,
but there are also laxatives and stool softeners, because all the narcotics
tend to create a bit of a logjam. So the nurse explains that two of the pills
are to help me take a shit eventually, and the morphine nudges my brain and
tells it that these pills are probably gonna make me shit the bed, and won’t
that be embarrassing? So I start hiding the pills in my cheek when the nurses
give them to me, and then cramming them under my pillow, which works for about
twenty minutes before a nurse finds them and tries to explain to my morphine
addled brain that the pills are to help me, but I just can’t understand, all I
hear is that she wants me to shit myself. So when she makes me take them again,
I pretend to swallow, and as she’s walking out of my curtained cubicle, I spat
them at her retreating back, where one of them stuck.
Here’s something you don’t realize about
nurses – they don’t put up with fucking shenanigans, lemme tell yah. I was on a
ward of people waking up from brain surgery, the majority of which were over
the age of 65, and the majority of which had no fucking idea what was going on.
There were about twenty-five beds on this ward, and every single on them was
occupied by some old, confused bastard who doesn’t know where they are. And
then there was me – 21 year old, ‘having a great time eating jello’ me. The two
men on either side of me constantly confused me for either their wives or one
of their children and would talk to me incessantly about stuff I couldn’t
understand with or without the morphine. They’d get angry I wouldn’t respond,
and start yelling and then the nurses would have to step in, and I’d get to
watch nurses Get. Shit. Done. There was no quiet shushing and cool cloths to
the forehead, there was ‘Mr Sanderson, you better lie back down RIGHT NOW!’ and
‘Don’t you grab me again, Arthur, I mean it!’.
It was an awesome spectator sport, but not so nice when you’re on the
receiving end of a tiny blond woman in pink scrubs telling you in no uncertain
terms that if you don’t take your poop pills she’s gonna MAKE you take your
poop pills. Morphine didn’t help make that any less frightening.
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| Whattaya gonna do if I don't, hey? -Oh... |
You
Will Be The Filthiest You’ve Ever Been
Morphine did
help for situations that I’d normally avoid at all costs. Like bath time with
strangers! My first week in recovery they wouldn’t let me out of bed, seeing as
how my legs didn’t really understand the concept of ‘standing’ or ‘walking’
just yet, so I was a stinking hot mess after a couple days. My mom helped me
wash my hair with a plastic basin and some ineffectual splashing, but it didn’t
really help, I was gross. But lo and behold – the hospital has a wicked awesome
strategy for patients who can’t bathe themselves – candy stripers!!! Seriously,
I was minding my own business, watching my hands flex and unflex as the
morphine did it’s thing one day, when a girl about my age pokes her head around
my curtain and asks if I’m ready for my bath. I was so drugged up and dirty
that I got super excited and tried to hug her as she started undressing me. I’m
not a prude, by any standards, but someone I could potentially go have a beer
with giving my dirty, starved, pale, tube-ridden body a wipe down – front and
back – is not something I would soberly agree to, but man, did I love every
second of that shit. Thanks morphine!
In my second
week, I was allowed to walk around but never by myself, in case I ate shit and
bonked my head off something or ripped all my leads out again (which I did
anyway, while my mom was watching but was too grossed out to stop me). So I got
to the point, again, where my stink was keeping people awake at night, so the
nurses told me that I could take a shower. A supervised shower. Now you’d think
that this means that someone is just outside the room, or maybe in the room but
just on the other side of the curtain, ready to pick your naked ass up if you
pop a rivet and go down, but no. Nononononono – there is no ‘just outside’,
there is no ‘curtain’, there is a room, with a shower in it, and there is you,
and there is your three hundred pound African nurse standing three feet away,
just… watching you. I guess the idea is that they want to actively try and catch
you if you start to fall, and normally the idea of someone making eye contact
with me while I soaped up my butt would give me the shivers, but morphine made
it awesome because now there was someone I could babble incessantly at:
‘Hey Trudy! I’m in the shower! Do you have
a dog? I wanna go to the desert! Look! Bubbles!!’
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| Like this but less sexy. |
The
Food They Give You Is Inedible, The Food In The Cafeteria Is Manna From Heaven
Ever had Salisbury steak? Did you enjoy
that experience? If you did, then you probably grew up locked in a cold war
bomb shelter and were only recently released. If you didn’t, then just imagine
how horrible that experience would be if the steak in question had been frozen
for an indiscernible amount of time, then not reheated but thawed, and placed
on a heated tray. I had meals so bad that even while sailing on the U.S.S
Morphine Drip I could tell they were disgusting. Vegetables so water-logged
they had lost all colour, so tastelessly foul I couldn’t actively tell what
they were. Mashed potatoes with the consistency of toothpaste, roast beef that looked
like particle board and tasted like salt and brown.
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| Enjoy your food-like shapes! |
Meal times were never something to be
looked forward to, especially when they’re weaning you off the painkillers,
which was unfortunate because that’s exactly when you start to get your
appetite back. Instead, the best part of my day became when visiting hours
started, because that’s when my parents could wheel me down to the cafeteria. A
place free of boiled vegetables and mystery meat and filled with Philly cheese
steaks, banana cream pie, cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, all made either
right in front of you or in house. I swear I almost bankrupted my parents with
those cafeteria visits. I was so under-weight and starved that in one sitting I
remember eating two cheese steaks with two sides of fries, two pieces of pizza,
three pieces of pie with whipped cream and two sundaes. My dad high-fived me, my mom looked like
she wanted to barf, I felt euphoric until I started thinking about the last
time I pooped.
Bowel
Movements Become a Very Big Deal
Before my surgery, I was on Percocet for almost two
months, and then a steady course of morphine for two weeks after that. The
Percocet not only made me constipated, they stole my appetite entirely. I
dropped almost twenty pounds in those two months alone, and probably ten more
during the hospital stay. I was not a healthy looking lady. So once I started
getting ready to leave the hospital, the nurses started asking for more details
about the last time I had a real bowel movement. And the only thing I could
answer was, ‘maybe in January?’, which was not exactly good news. Everyone
started talking really quietly for a couple of minutes before they informed me
that as desperate I was to get out of that plague hotel, I wouldn’t be able to
unless I pooped – not like, in front of them, thank god, but you know, while
they were around. This became a nightmare. I was so sick of the hospital, so
tired of being hooked up to shit, having my blood taken every hour, hearing
other sick people being sick, seeing other people’s families peering at me,
smelling that hospital smell. All I had to do was shit, and I could go. And I
couldn’t. I seriously couldn’t. They gave me a few laxatives and I went into
the bathroom and stayed there for two hours, and nothing happened. I wanted to
cry. I pushed like I was in labour and sweated and swore and was warned by the
nurses that if I strained too hard I could rupture something. I ended up having
a bit of a nervous breakdown and incurring so much sympathy from my medical
team that they decided to let me go as long as I promised to call them as soon
as I managed a poop.
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| "She did it!" |
I wish this whole sequence of events had a
moral. I wish I had gone through this and come out the other side with some
sort of insight, or perspective. Like, I’ve now dedicated my life to building
schools in Africa or training seeing-eye dogs. But truth be told I’m still the
marginally terrible person I was before my near death experience, I still have
the same bad habits, the same propensity to date assholes, the same unshakeable
thirst for bourbon cocktails. All I can really say that I learned from this
whole messy business is that no one should ever mess with nurses, cause they
control your pain meds, I could do the backstroke in a septic tank and still
feel cleaner than I did just lying in a bed for a week, and if you roll French
fries up in a pizza slice like a burrito, then cram that into a Philly cheese
steak, you will not be sorry, my friend.
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