Twitch!

Twitch: A short, sudden, jerking, or convulsive movement. I watched my eye do this again and again as I looked in the mirror and attempted to put on my mascara. I was getting ready to leave the house, drive to my “new to me” office downtown, and see clients from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm. I had a teen group to lead at 5:00 and needed to get handouts printed and some snacks to give them something to look forward to. But my eye kept twitching.

Why was my eye twitching like that? I didn’t feel particularly stressed. And my cheek feels kind of funny too. Suddenly, the only conversation I remember having with my neurosurgeon before my brain surgery eight years prior popped into my mind. At our first meeting he had taken another MRI and when he put it up on the lighted screen, he gasped and seemed shocked. It had grown exponentially larger since my first MRI just a month before. “It’s like it is reaching critical mass,” he had said. “It’s growing very rapidly! Do you have any twitching of your left eye or do you feel any tingling in your left cheek?” he asked.

“No…” I responded.

“That’s astounding to me,” he said.

I had spoken with him many times that day and for the next week. I spent four days in ICU after the surgery and he came by to see me on each of those days…but once the surgery was performed, the memory of those days was nothing but a blur. I was on a large amount of steroids and my mind felt like scrambled eggs. So maybe remembering only that part of a conversation we had before the surgery isn’t so surprising. But thank God I remembered it. It ended up saving my life. I made an appointment with my personal physician in my hometown.

I wasn’t terribly worried. I had been getting annual MRIs on my brain since my surgery in 2006. I had overcome years of not being able to walk, seeing double, adjusting to deafness, and regaining my balance. I had pushed myself through seven straight years of full-time college with brain surgery right between a BA and a Masters, through two more years for licensing, and now just a few years of private practice. I had done it because I had truly believed I was right smack dab in the middle of God’s will for my life. No one could have told me otherwise. Obviously, God wouldn’t allow the brain tumor to grow back! And besides, every single time I had my annual MRI I was told there was no growth. “It’s stable!” my doctor reported every August.

My doctor walked into the examining room, my latest MRI in his hand.

“It’s growing again,” were words I didn’t expect. I had been so unconcerned that I had gone to the appointment alone, but ten years later I still remember calling my husband as I drove down Broadway, the stops at all the stop signs, the sunny cloudless sky. “It’s growing back.” I sobbed into my cell phone. Thankfully it was just a ten minute drive from home.

I requested my MRIs from the prior years so I could send them, along with the new one, to my surgeon in Los Angeles. As I read the reports for myself, it became clear to me that all the “it’s stable” reports I had gotten hadn’t been truthful. It had grown each year for the prior three years. I began to ask questions. To this day, I haven’t gotten answers.

My surgeon in Los Angeles called. “You will have to have the surgery all over again. This is an aggressive tumor. If I don’t remove it again, it will kill you.”

So, I packed up my office downtown, the larger one I had just moved into the month before. The one I had just bought new furniture for. The one in the elegant 100 plus-year-old building with the atrium on the fourth floor and the receptionist and gorgeous waiting room. I got out of the lease, packed it up, and we flew back to Los Angeles for another eight hour surgery.

I was dazed and confused. That’s the thing I remember most about that time. Why, in God’s literal name, did this happen? Was this a game God was playing with my life? Cat and mouse per se?

The outcome of this surgery was somewhat different from the first one. I could walk, but balance was an issue. The double vision was back and my left side was much weaker from the right. I wondered about a stroke. My smile was off kilter, with the right side working while the left side stubbornly refused to follow suite. The left side of my head and face and inside the left side of my mouth and tongue were completely numb. The hospital staff kept bringing me regular meals and I kept trying to explain I couldn’t eat…I was afraid of choking. No one seemed to be hearing me. “You need to eat,” was the only answer I got. My surgeon assured me that the numbness would wear off within 3-4 weeks. It never did.

I flew home for a second time, again diminished in my capacities and wondering about recovery and timeframes and why God? I tried to use my computer and typed out gibberish as my left hand wouldn’t work any longer. I tried to talk, to eat, to rush through recovery and believe I wasn’t going to be left in this state.

For another three years I experienced what I thought of as “brain surgery fatigue.” Again, crawling upstairs instead of walking upright became a thing.

One day, I had a thought that seemed to come out of nowhere. I had been thinking my confused thoughts about why God allowed this to happen to me. Everything I had been taught in the churches I had attended for four decades had me believing that if I was right in the center of God’s will for my life, these things wouldn’t happen. Was I doing something wrong? Was God angry at me so He took this career away from me? I had clearly been put on the sidelines. What did it all mean? In the middle of this reverie, a thought came.

“I just want you to enjoy your life.”

Enjoy my life? How? I only know how to be driven, afraid of getting things wrong, working out my own salvation. How do I simply enjoy my life? I rejected that thought out of hand.

“I just want you to enjoy your life.” The thought came at odd times. I could be reading, or cooking, or talking to a friend. There it was again.

It took several years, the reading of certain books, prayer and an almost monastic isolation, but I was finally able to let go of the certainty that had precariously held me together for years after the rape, the mental illness, the suicides of my brother and father, the abusive relationships and divorce, the loss of my mom, grandmother, and aunt, the broken neck and the unrelenting brain tumor. I was finally able to relax into mystery and wonder and be grateful for my life just the way it was. I was finally able to just enjoy it.

To read the rest of my story, feel free to peruse prior posts. For a shorter version, watch my interview on Ilona Goanos podcast by clicking here.

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