At the end of the summer, I let a doctor cut a big hole in my head. It hurt so much, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I had a trigeminal schwannoma. This is the “good” kind of brain tumor: Slow growing, benign, and extremely survivable. It messed with my facial nerves and vision, but nothing really scary like memory or cognition. That being said, they did cut a big ol’ hole in my head, carve a lump off my brain, patch up my skull with metal plates, and reattach my scalp with forty-one staples. It hurt! It hurt like nothing has ever hurt my body before.
The first thing that hurt was just knowing it existed, and not knowing what might happen next. What? A brain tumor? On ME? But I did not ask for this! How could this be mine?
So, within seconds of finding out I had it, I kind of huffily marched over to Jesus and said, “Look, I did not ask for this, and I definitely don’t want it. Therefore, it is not mine. Therefore, it must be yours. You deal with it, please.”
Spoiler: He did.
The surgery went very well. They got most of the tumor, and I may not even need radiation for the nubbin that remains. Staples are out, opioids are done, and my head is returning to head shape, rather than the bulging squash thing I had going on for a while. The surgeon even gave me an unexpectedly cool undercut.
But it hurt, a lot. Sometime in the first few nights after surgery, I felt myself pressed up against a wall of blinding pain. I couldn’t even tell where my head was. I thought I had a steel beam coming out of my face; I thought I had tusks. I thought I was all head, and made of sizzling brick.
Then it got worse. There was no me at all; just the pain-dealing thing I was up against, and the pain. There was no air in which to concoct presumptions or spiritual vanity; no capacity to build any kind of mental or emotional facade. There was just the pain that was me, and this thing making pain. This wall, this stone, this beam I was pressed up against.
Oh, a wooden beam. The tiny splinter of cognition that remained threw out a thought: I know what that is.
I knew, because I have known all my life, that God is real and God is love and God died on the cross for me. In his mercy, I remembered those things even then, even though they sounded ludicrously implausible. What I felt was barbarically alone with pain, and I only had two choices: Pain for no reason, or pain for some reason that God knew. The second one sounded better, so that’s what I picked. I had no say about being crushed almost to annihilation against this wood. I did have a choice about what that wood might actually be. I declared it was the cross. It was the most terrible, glorious thing I have ever had the chance to do, and it was the most powerless I have ever been.
It was good, so good, to know exactly what was going on, for once. Things were simple. They were so horribly bad, but they were so magnificently lucid. I was hurt. God might be there. That was it. Existence was so clear. With a kind of excruciating joy, I comprehended what free will is, and how to employ it. Pax inter spinas. I got it.
Anyway, that passed. I was in the hospital for five days, and I had some really bad nights when I did get home. At one point, the pain reached such a hysterical clamor that all I could think of to do was walk around cradling a stuffed duck, breathing shakily and pretending it was the one who needed to be comforted.
I slept a lot. I cried a little. I ate some soup and some applesauce, and later thought to wipe the dribbles off my numb face. I went outside once a day to totter through my overgrown yard, gazing dumbly at my bolted lettuce and rotted eggplants, willing my legs away from blood clots. Little by little, my mind cleared, my scalp started waking up, and my life felt less dire as the pain receded.
And that was good, surely. Less pain is good. So why did I feel so bereft?
Read the rest of my latest for The Pillar [subscriber content].
Image: Jesus carries his cross., István Schaller
I wasn’t able to read the rest of the article due to the paywall, but the part I read was inspirational. So sorry you had to go through that, but I’m glad you were able to draw nearer to God in the process. Continued prayers.