Rearranged – Again

Brain Rearranged – Again

The following was written on August 4, 2009, though I hadn't posted it at that time. Now - in late January, almost six months post-surgery, I'm once again ready to read what I wrote but didn't edit enough to post. So for the next few posts, they will be out of time sequence...
....and now it is May 11, 2010 when I actually post this:


I’m alive.
I'm free at last!
It's been only a week since the surgery and I feel TERRIFIC!

On July 28th, Dr. Takanori Fukushima, world renowned neurosurgeon, succeeded in removing almost all of the tumor that was located against my brain stem at the back of my skull.

My head still aches. For another six days, I will continue to wear a white baseball cap purchased at the first gas station stop after being released from the hospital in order to hide the hideous horseshoe arrangement of staples that temporarily holds together my head.

For now, I am focusing on the miracle of being alive and tumor-free rather than write about the hospital stay. I choose not to describe the days between then and now. I choose now to focus on the miracles…

No one knows, but it's likely to have been twenty to thirty years those suckers were slowly growing, squeezing my brain so that the left side was compressed by at least a third its original size thereby interfering with my speech, my thought processing and my balance. The changes occurred so slowly I didn't recognize the many symptoms as anything other than aging until the last few months. Whatever hindrances were due to compression of my brain are now gone.
My curiosity is aroused because I don’t even know what hindrances I had. Some were obvious but, never having named them as symptoms, I didn’t relate to them as being temporary or correctable. So, I don’t know how it is to be Penny without tumors. As the days and weeks unfold, I expect to be surprised.

There’s a newfound impetus to treat myself very well – take good care of my health and well-being. For so long I did not. When my previous efforts were unrewarded with renewed energy, with better health, I blamed myself for waiting too late in life to make my efforts count. Not now. Now I expect to feel good as a result of my healthful lifestyle. You’d have thought I’d gotten the clues that were lying around, but no. I now get to live the difference.

My present difficulty is lack of clear vision due to the optic cortex firing away in its efforts to knit back together after Fukushima’s scraping away the tumor debris.

In 3 months I’ll have another MRI to make sure that the tumor is not trying to return. Thereafter, I’ll have a semi-annual MRI for the same purpose. That will be my reminder……..gratitude for the life I have now.

Free of tumors and soon to be free of all medications.