Does the story have an ending?

I reupped with both Weightwatchers and Curves this week, and it occurred to me that this may be the ending of the journey that began when the aneurysm in my brain blew a couple of years ago. The whole six weeks that I was in Intensive Care, my friends and family would tell me that it would make a great book that I could write after it was all over. I’m used to using my life for literary ends, so of course, I agreed. I started writing when I was in Rehab, and this is what I said:

“I cannot tell you how this story ends because it has barely begun. It is, suppose the story of my new life.But first it is the end of the old.

“Everyone says I’m here to ;earn spme lessob, but whaat can it be…”

The typos are transcribed exactly. I had ataxia, which was a function of the brain damage and the hydrocephalus and my fingers didn’t work right. Even worse, as I wrote a couple of lines later

“by the time i get done getting into this, i fprget what i had to say.”

The ataxia is gone thanks to the shunt and I’m pretty good at remembering, unless I get tired. But what was signal for me in that first writing was that the story had barely begun. I knew that; I didn’t know where it was going; I didn’t know when it would end. I suppose an ending is arbitrary even now, but the weight loss and exercise programs seems like good enough bookends to me. I had just lost a lot of weight after a zealous period on Weightwatchers when the aneurysm burst. Ridiculous as I know it is, I couldn’t help those two things being tied in my mind, and the weight that I gained post-aneurysm seemed, I don’t know, fitting or something.

“I have to atart taking myself seriously as a sick persoc. i keep looking to see how i can immediately restore my life to pre-aneur ‘normal’” I wrote in that same journal entry. So perhaps the added weight was a way of really marking me physically as being a different person, since the aneurysm didn’t show on the outside.

So what’s different now? I had the big angiogram in July and that came back good. I had a CAT scan the other week and that came back good. I’m going to live. I’m no longer “a sick person.” Now, the only medical problems I have are those associated with being overweight and underexercised. And that I have control over.

Tagged as: cerebral aneurysm