I would normally start a post such as this with an ironic comment pointing to the fact that for the first time EVER, there has been no new post on MidLifeBloggers this past week. My sense of irony is elsewhere these days; I’m dealing with a life situation that is frighteningly real.
I have to have surgery. On my spine. Actually on my neck, the cervical portion of my spine. Have I written about this before? Not really. I wrote about tripping on some shoes and breaking my shoulder, and I wrote about doing a faceplant on the streets of San Francisco. But the follow up to those posts, the one I never wrote, was about being diagnosed with spinal stenosis.
Spinal stenosis: “my father/aunt/sister/cousin has that” you might say. It’s not uncommon, it usually affects the lower back and it can often be dealt with through physical therapy. That’s not the one I have. Mine is cervical spinal stenosis and it is accompanied by another condition: cord compression. Simply put, the boney growths on my spine are squeezing my spinal cord.
This is why I keep falling. This is why I’m so tentative balance-wise that I’m never without a railing, a wall, or another person to give me ballast. This is why I can’t walk more than a block without getting totally winded, needing to stop, rest, regroup.
There is if not a cure than a ‘fix’ for this condition: surgery. They cut open your neck–sometimes from the front and sometimes from the back–ream out the offending boney growths on the affected vertebrae, maybe attach a metal plate for stability, sew you back up and send you off to see how many of your “symptoms” have been resolved. No promises, no guarantees. The only guarantee they give is that if I don’t have the surgery, I will continue to get worse. Oh–and by the way, as the diagnosing neurologist advised, “Don’t get whip-lash, because you’ll end up paralyzed.”
It is amazing to me how I have and have not dealt with this. I have a quasi-medical background and yet I’ve been indulging in magical thinking for the past two years. “It’s gone away…See, I haven’t fallen in ages…It really seems as if it’s easier for me to get up from a seated position…Is it my imagination or did I heft that 12-pack of Coke with less effort than before?”
I so want this thing to go away of its own accord. I so don’t want to walk myself into the hospital and put myself under the surgeon’s knife at the same place where a decade ago an ambulance rushed me with a ruptured cerebral aneurysm.
It’s been ten years since I spent six weeks, much of it in intensive care, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. I made what doctors (and statistics) will tell you is a miraculous recovery. I show few outward signs of the stroke, or at least few that others can see. Or at least few that I think others can see. I compensate well and that too has enabled me to do some magical thinking about my health. It happened but it didn’t really happen. It happened but I can’t remember the details of it. It happened and I choose not to remember the details. Except for the ones that strike me as funny.
Perhaps that is what the aneurysm left me with: an enhanced sense of humor. As well as an inability to recall words when I’m tired. And the right side of my face is somewhat droopy. But that’s nothing to complain about when you consider that I spend most of my life sitting–at a computer, on a sofa, at a dining table–by myself. By myself I feel just fine. By myself, I’m never at a loss for words. By myself I’m the same Jane that I’ve always been.
Except, I’m not. And now I’m about to put myself through a similar experience. Who knows what will happen once the anesthesiologist puts me to sleep. And the surgeon cuts. And I wake up–to what? Will I be even less of the same Jane than before? Will I still be able to fake it? I don’t know. And I won’t know until I do it.
Which I have to do. There’s no way out. No alternative that is more palatable. I just have to do it.
Photo credit: http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/texts/empire/large6874.html
