Mortal

May 22, 2017

The night before my emergency brain surgery is when I consciously thought about what it would mean to die. I was nineteen, blindingly guileless, and trying to do and be it all at the height of my college years. Then, the next day, I’m going under the knife for a surgery my extremely experienced doctor termed, “risky.”  We all think about death. We all have a moment it becomes real to us. This was mine.

A week before the surgery, I had been in my dorm room trying to avoid an assignment. It was Labor Day; I was binge-watching Criminal Minds and raiding my 20lbs chocolate stash for the better part of the day. Finally, that evening, I figured I should actually get to work.  

Sitting at my desk, staring at the document that only contained my name and the date, I was struggling with the title when I had a sudden pain in my chest and my right arm fell by my side. It was numb, cold to the touch, blue, and felt like pins and needles were inside of it. As I'm slowly struggling to type, "can a 19-year-old have a heart attack?" into Google with my left hand, a friend and fellow Resident Advisor knocked on my door. Seeing my distress and discolored arm, she grabbed my car keys off of my desk and promptly announced she was taking me to the emergency room, whether I liked it or not.

Hours later, after the emergency clinic ended in the doctor fist-bumping my good arm, giving me pain meds, and telling me to sleep it off, and after my dad drove 100 miles to pick me up from school and drive me 100 miles back home to a local emergency room, I'm looking for a second opinion. My arm still isn't working, it's 4:00 in the morning, and the doctors redo all of the tests I had earlier. An MRI, an Ultrasound, an EKG, and X-Ray. They find nothing and tell me they're sending the images, panels, and readouts to specialists but send me home in the meantime.

I slept. I slept on the couch in the clothes I’d been wearing since yesterday morning when I was still on top of the world. I slept until my parents woke me up to go to a doctor’s appointment. We’re sitting in a vascular surgeon’s exam room and I think I could sleep some more. The doc jokes that I can, in the MRI. Great, another MRI. He doesn’t waste time, but sends me to the head of the line and I feel bad for all of the people in the waiting room who have been there longer. He tells us we can go home straight after and he’ll call us later that day with the results. I suppose that lack of blood flow and potentially permanent nerve damage gets you priority access. Better than a Disney Fast Pass!

We go home, we get lunch, we wait. We wait some more. I slept. I slept through my parents getting a call from the doctor. He tells them the MRI found something they weren’t looking for as the scan just happened to include my neck and the bottom of my skull; he’s sending it to a neurosurgeon for a second opinion. The neurosurgeon will call them directly to set up an appointment. This is Tuesday evening and they elect not to tell me right away.

Wednesday night, they tell me what’s going on and that I’ve got an appointment the next morning, 8:00 in the morning, at Montgomery Neurosurgical Associates. Now, I recognize that I should have picked up on the fact that when I have an appointment at a place that has “surgical” literally in the name, that I’m going to have surgery. Did I pick up on that fact? No, not until 8:17am the next morning when a very stoic, very dry MD flips open an obnoxiously large leather planner to search for the earliest date available for him to slice open the back of my skull with the same ease and precision he writes my name in the lines for next Wednesday, six days away.

The rest of that day just included a lot of sobbing. Sobbing in the doctor’s parking lot. Sobbing over cheese biscuits at a bbq place, sobbing while my mom took me to get a pedicure, sobbing well past my hydration levels, sobbing to myself and God when it got really quiet and I was going to sleep.  

The next several days, I was making arrangements. Getting clothing from school, going to my pre-op, emailing professors, texting friends, going shopping and buying a $90 pair of heels because, why not? I might die. I didn’t have time to breathe much less think.  

But everything slowed down the night before my surgery. My family went out to dinner, and my parents let me pick where obviously. My dad referred to it as, “Madison’s last meal” at least three times. I almost punched him at least four times.  

When we made it back home, I went out into the backyard and made my way to the swing on the porch. It was September in Alabama, so the air was muggy but the calm terror I began to feel was more oppressive.

Sitting on the swing’s cushion that hadn’t been washed all summer, swatting mosquitos, and looking over the barely standing shed at the low-hanging sun, I realized I could very easily die that next day, at nineteen years old, and no one would be surprised. People were actively hoping and praying I wouldn’t. I began to feel numb and the backyard slipped away as I stared ahead without seeing. My legs continued to rock the swing back and forth out of habit, but what struck me the most was this feeling of my entire torso compressing my heart, lungs, and stomach. I felt my body collapsing in on my heart and I don’t mean just physically. The weight of my surroundings pressed into me, even though all that wrapped around me was the night. My breathing felt even and present. Like all I could do was continue to breathe in and out. I focused hard on each and every breath, realizing I might no longer have that luxury.

It was somewhere in this sequence that my dad wandered out onto the porch. As he sat down beside me, I untangled my feelings. 

In a still, small, higher-than-normal voice, I asked, “Dad? What if I die?” 

And he didn’t look at me. He didn’t reach out to comfort me. He just sat there, swinging alongside me, and said simply, “then there’ll be a hole in my heart.” 

All I could do was nod.

He did not tell me it would all be okay. Because we didn’t know. He didn’t tell me I’d be fine and that I was still young and I’d have another fifty years and I’d do so much. We didn’t know if I’d have another fifty hours or that even if I survived the surgery I would come out okay. All he said was what I needed to know; that he loved me and that I would be missed. That I wouldn’t be forgotten; and that I would be loved long after I was gone.

I think I cried. I think I asked more questions about life and God and the next day. But ultimately, I knew. I knew dying was incredibly real. I knew life was not fair according to my terms, and I knew I might never have the future I planned. I knew dying.

And I felt helpless. I felt weak.

Possibly dying means no one tells you everything is going to be okay. It means people start saying goodbye, just in case.

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