Six.

Last night I got on stage in front of a crowd of just over 300 people and told a story at The Bee about brain surgery. It was mostly lighthearted, full of my typical awkward sass, with little glimpses of the trauma that still sits so deeply in my bones. I was nervous leading up to the show, but felt very calm once my name was called (second to last, meaning my stress centers had already exploded, so that worked in my favor). I talk about Trent and The Situation with some frequency, but there was something so special about telling this story to a room full of mostly strangers the night before the sixth anniversary.

The sixth anniversary. It seems unreal that it could have been that long and it also sometimes seems unreal that it happened at all. It’s so far away and there’s been so much life in the interim that I occasionally have to remind myself that it was real. Six years later and I still wish this day could feel celebratory, but I’m relaxing into the fact that there might always be a heaviness to it. There’s indescribable gratitude of course, and that’s celebratory in a way, but I find that, more than anything, what I want on this day is to be quiet and to be held tightly and to feel safe.

There was a line in my story last night about how, given what my life looked like when surgery was happening (2^nd year in a PhD program, working 90 hours a week), there was just no option to come undone. Falling apart wasn’t something I could do. After my story was over, Giuliana (resident Beekeeper/host of this badass show) got back on stage and said something to the effect of “Ah! Of COURSE you had an option!” Six years later, and a year and a half after leaving graduate school, that still caught me last night and I thought, “Oh yeah, technically I did, I guess.” It certainly didn’t feel like it. I had built my entire life around graduate school and had left absolutely no time for processing or grieving or feeling much of anything. One of the first things I worried about after finding out that surgery was necessary was how I would manage school – initially, I was wanting to have the surgery during our holiday break, take a week or two off at the beginning of the semester, and then jump right back in. That’s so goddamn insane when I think about it now, the fact that I entertained that thought at all, let alone tried to make it happen. I was devastated about needing to take a full semester of medical leave. And indeed, by the end of January that year, I was already back on campus going to meetings. I was teaching an online course from my couch. I was working on my thesis. I had completely forgotten until I was rereading old blog posts the other day that on November 21^st, the day I found out so unexpectedly that I had to have surgery, I left that appointment with Dr. Fults and went straight to class. I went to class, you guys. What the fuck? I could easily laugh about it, about how crazy that was, but in reality it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart to think that I was living a life where I didn’t know how to grieve, I didn’t know how to say no, I didn’t know what my options were.

I still have a lot to learn. 2016 was about removing myself from toxicity, and 2017 was about reclaiming my life and building a community of the dearest friends. The people who are my foundation now, my Council of Mothers, my SuperFriends… I hadn’t met them yet when I wrote on this day last year. They have taught me how to ground myself and step into vulnerability and feel the deepest grief… the kind that makes you feel like you can’t breathe or stand up. I have so much to learn still, but there’s movement. I didn’t process much of anything non-academic when I was in graduate school. After I left, I was wholly overwhelmed with this rapid spiral of so many big things I hadn’t let myself feel over the previous six years. Things have calmed down and evened out recently and I have the space to think about things like brain surgery. About how the smell of rubbing alcohol makes me reel for a few minutes. About how I looked at the clock right at 7:30 this morning and remembered, with every inch of my body, what it felt like to let go of my dad’s hand as I was wheeled down to the operating room at exactly 7:30. About what it was like to come into the OR and see so many people milling around and preparing. About what it was like to be laid down flat, have them put a big, thick plastic mask over my nose and mouth and say “this is just oxygen.” About my next memory being opening my eyes in the ICU and realizing I was alive and it was over. I still struggle with letting myself describe all of this as “trauma” because it went well, so it shouldn’t be traumatic. But that’s bullshit. It was and is. It might always be to an extent. That’s okay, because I have such a strong tribe behind me.

I read my full operative report last week. I had read a version of it last year, but it wasn’t the full version (I didn’t know that at the time). This was the whole official report. It says thing like, “We turned a suboccipital craniectomy using a high-speed air drill and various rongeurs.” (I had to look up that word… Wikipedia defines it as “a strongly constructed instrument with a sharp-edged, scoop-shaped top, used for gouging out bone.”) It mentions that they used Durepair and Medpor for closing my dura and my skull, so I was able to look those up and actually know what the things in my skull look like. It says, “Patient was at high risk for cerebral edema and hemorrhage overnight and required close ICU supervision.” It’s surreal to read that and know it’s referring to me.

This morning, two of my dear work friends walked down to the Neuro Critical Care Unit (NCCU), where I was for about 26 hours after surgery, before being moved to the Neuro Acute Care (NAC) floor. The NCCU is right down the hall from my office and when I first started working here, I had a hard time even walking past the closed doors. Today I was ready to go into the unit for the first time since I was a patient there. I found my room, 3322, and it was one of the only rooms on the unit without a patient in it, so I was able to just stand and look at it for a few minutes. It was wild. I had such a clear memory of what the doors looked like, and about being close to the door to the unit itself, and that turned out to be an accurate memory. The clock on the wall was exactly where I remembered it, as was the sink. I remember saying to my bff Emilie a few weeks after surgery that it was crazy that my ICU room didn’t actually look like an ICU room… because of course from my perspective, it didn’t. All I saw was the bed, the door, and the hallway. Em looked at me and said, “Yeeeeah no, it sure did.” And sure enough, it most definitely looks and feels like an ICU. I’m glad I was able to see it relatively calmly this morning.

Six years. From nearly a decade of undiagnosed symptoms and ending up feeling like I was crazy and didn’t know my own body, to a marble-sized tumor/cyst combo, to a golf ball, to surgery, to what feels like a new world six years later. Feeling the powerful weight of grief and gratitude today.