My Dumb Brain, Part 1

Part One

The moral of this story is “just listen to your mom.”

I woke up on a Wednesday very tired and called in sick to work. I work a hybrid schedule, three days in the office, two days from home, and logged in to the office to put a quick fix on something I wouldn’t be there to handle. I had no trouble doing this.

The next morning, I woke up at what I believed was 8:10 am, as in ten minutes late. My folks, with whom I live, woke up a couple of hours later and asked me what I was doing up so early. I thought they had slept in. In the meantime, I was trying to work and couldn’t fill out a password correctly to save my life. I locked myself out of my laptop twice and had to call IT to get me back in.

The previous Monday, I had taken my first dose of an injectable diet drug. So my initial thought was I was having some weird side effect to that. This was not the case.

So I worked on Thursday. And I got up on Friday and worked again. I called my doctor’s office; they suggested maybe I had Covid.

At this point, I was slurring my words. I did the F.A.S.T. stroke test—Face Drooping (Nope), Arm Weakness (Nope), Speech Problems (Yep), Time To Call 911—but I insisted nothing was wrong, just as Mom insisted there was, because she’s not a dope like me. After another day of working from home, I logged off early and told my boss I was going to get a COVID test. I was all set to drive myself to a nearby urgent care center. Instead, my dad drove me. They sent me to the emergency room, because when you click “slurred speech” on the entry form, they see you pretty quick.

We got to the ER around 6:00, they stuck me in a room where I watched Jeopardy and an episode of 20/20 True Crime. At one point, I was wheeled out to get a CAT Scan, in which I lay down on a moving bench with my head inside a giant metal donut.

Shortly thereafter, around 11:00 pm, a doctor told me they’d found a “mass” in my brain. It was so late and such a surreal scene that it still doesn’t feel exactly real. If I was ever to receive dire news like this, I expected a somber doctor’s office, not a burgeoning Friday night ER with a random doctor crouching by my bedside.

Probably while this song was playing.

To be honest, my first thoughts were not of my life and how it had just changed. I was worried about insurance. Am I gonna go bankrupt? Do I need to start a GoFundMe? This whole thing is going to be a huge pain in the ass.

The young man who had been looking after me (and using my crotch as a makeshift desk while he took blood) told me I was to be admitted. He commented that I’d had some “Sad news.” Kinda hated him in that moment.

They wheeled me up to an empty room in the ICU, where I did a little dance to convince a nurse I was capable of getting into bed myself.

To my surprise, I slept. It had been a long fucking day.

The next morning, my family returned. I was very emotional and sounded like Kermit the Frog. I tried to distract myself by watching Formula One Racing. Not something I normally do.

Breakfast was a banana and a “toasted” bagel. By “Toasted” I mean slightly warm to the touch. Is it weird that I could recognize it as a Lender’s frozen bagel?

Murray Lender sells us on bagels.

For reasons unknown to me, I have become a fiend for bananas since this started.

Most of the day was spent waiting for the MRI.

If you’ve never had an MRI, it’s like the bit in The Mummy here Arnold Vosloo is entombed against his will , if it were happening in a club with the world’s worst electronic dance music DJ. This was like the CAT scan but much worse, because I was being shoved into the washing machine. Before I went in, they went over me with a metal detector wand and asked about penile implants. This I did not wish to contemplate.

They lay me down and put my head in a hockey-mask-esque-cage and gave me a Panic bulb to squeeze if it became too much. The only reason I didn’t squeeze it was knowing the entire horrible process would start over if I did. I am what you might call a big fat guy, so I was taking up a lot of space in this noise tube. And the noise! Good gravy! It was astonishingly loud and just mind-shattering. I had a pair of ear-pods in my ears that did nothing whatsoever to block out the noise. Did they play any music for me? Did they bollocks.

I couldn’t think. I tried to call up comforting memories. I tried to recite my times tables. I tried anything to make my derelict brain fight back against the onslaught. No dice.

It was like this, but much louder and also it was happening in a giant magnet tube.

I’m a very polite person when I’m not shooting my mouth off online, but as the techs freed me from, I told them “Fuck a bunch of that.”

After I was released, I was wheeled back upstairs and tried to call down to the cafeteria to get something to eat. I received no answer, and was at this point hangry enough to stomp to the vending machines and buy a bunch of garbage food.

This led to another long night of having my vitals taken and my blood sugar, several times. The Oreos and Orange soda elevated this.

In the morning, a doctor visited me—I was on the phone with Mom at the time and I’m still not sure who I was talking to—and told me my tumor—I hate calling it a tumor—did not appear to have metastasized from anywhere else in my body. So lucky me, the Tumor Fairy visited me.

I was discharged Sunday afternoon. We went to Wendy’s and I had a Baconator because I am all about Health.

For the next few days, I had nothing to do while I waited for an appointment with a neurosurgeon. I spent my time reading and filling my tablet with TV to watch. And waiting. Aaaaand waiting. Aaaaaand waiting.

In his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams gives a description of a phenomenon he called “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.” This is what the next few days felt like.

““In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”

To Be Continued