Getting On with It: The Four-Month Check-In

Now you see it...

...now you don't: the magic of hairspray & backcombing

You haven’t heard much from me since December. Honestly, there hasn’t been much to say. I returned to my teaching job at the beginning of January and started back at my Hamline MFA program at the very end of January. I’m running again, too. The last “cognitive episode” I had, when I became instantly overwhelmed and exhausted by looking at our new exercise bike (a multi-step process kind of overwhelmed), was December 8^th. I've had moments of feeling uncomfortable at work--I am often writing on the whiteboard, thus displaying the back of my head to the class--but none of my students have noticed, or they're just too polite to say anything. If it weren’t for those little bald spots at the back of my head and the still pretty short hair around them, you wouldn’t be able to tell that I’d had brain surgery. I myself can’t tell most of the time. (To see what my head looked like right after surgery, read "It's Not About the Hair.")

Getting back to my old self and Life As Usual wasn’t the easiest transition, however. I’ve written before about how I felt there were certain gifts I received from my brain surgery which I lost as I recovered. Honestly, the week before I returned to work and every drive to work for the first two weeks, I was in a low state, borderline depressed. I was being forced out of my quiet, peaceful cocoon – physically pushed out but also mentally—and I didn’t like it.

My favorite modern philosopher Alain de Botton wrote in The Art of Travel that one of the reasons so many people don’t enjoy their vacation travels as much as they thought they would is that they bring with them the one common denominator in all their troubles and woes: themselves. Basically, wherever you go, there you are. 

I understood this idea on a new level as I recovered from brain surgery. Within my 2-month break from work, I had been given about a 5-week vacation from myself, though if you had asked me during those five weeks, I would’ve told you that I felt surprisingly normal. To my recently surgically-poked mind, I think I equated a lack of pain or sleepiness with being “normal.” It was only in retrospect that I realized how my brain wasn’t exactly functioning properly. (Read about what has become known as "The Tale of the Four White Cardigans" for an example.) Most of the world outside slipped away from me, and much of the monkey chatter in my brain that typifies me slipped away, too. I had the Peace ‘n Quiet that so many people dream about.

A visual approximation of my normal brain

However, in the midst of my melancholy, I received a Christmas present of a book of short essays/speeches by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk. His discussions of impermanence helped me let go of not only that time period but that artificially created cognitive state, too. I was then able to see that I had brought some souvenirs back with me from my brain vacation, and they’re good ones, not like a crappy t-shirt in dayglo colors. First of all, my addiction to Candy Crush (regular and Soda Saga) has been vanquished! I truly was an addict and feel embarrassed when I think about all the hours I wasted moving around colorful digital candies. I did play it a few times after surgery, though. The first couple times it was too difficult because my vision wasn’t great and my fine motor skills were even worse. Even as those things improved, though, the game just didn’t appeal to my mind. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, probably because the little squares and circles are visual noise, and noise of any kind taxed me. I don’t think I’ve played since early December.

Related to that is a better overall sense of time management. I was a queen of time-wasting. My late afternoons used to be especially wasteful. (I work part-time, so I’m usually home by 2:30 or 3.) Getting a Fitbit has helped, especially with an incentive program through my husband’s company that rewards certain walking behaviors with money for one’s health savings account. Consequently, I’m up and walking 500 steps in seven minutes six times a day. Those little bursts of movement keep me awake and sharper minded, so I can more easily tackle homework, writing, cleaning, exercising, or reading. In essence, I’m better able to spend my time in ways that matter to me.

One final issue in this check-in: memory. If I’m being completely honest, I have noticed a slight downgrade in my ability to retrieve learned information. This is not the same as losing short-term or long-term memory. I have no problem remembering things that happened, that I experienced. I have, however, noticed that certain facts have been buried deep in my noggin and they take some delicate prying to get out: vocabulary words, the capital of Canada, names of former students that were in my class not too long ago. There’s a layer of thick-skinned pudding over some of these things that slows their retrieval. Of course, I’ve also considered that I might just be more attuned to what’s going on in my head since my post-surgical days when most of my thoughts fell into the category of “hyper-metacognition.” Ottawa might have been buried in my gray matter before then, but I’ve only just become aware of it recently.

So, in the words of my home state of Wisconsin, Forward.
Note: Some of the upcoming posts are ones that I wrote either before surgery or in the month afterward. There was so much to write about and get out into the world in a timely manner that some of those posts just had to wait. I'll release them periodically, though they're out of chronological order. I'm also hoping to get a couple of fellow ex-meningiomates to do guest posts here, so that readers can get a good sense of how different the experiences can be.