the hospital...

i spent tuesday evening through midday saturday in the hospital. until my biopsy on friday, i was in room 461, in the telemetry ward, which is like the middle ground between your regular run-of-the-mill hospital room and intensive care. the primary difference is that in the telemetry ward, you're hooked up to a heart monitor all the time and a nurse comes in every 4 hours to check your vital signs. during the first few hours i was there on tuesday, i wasn't allowed out of bed at all, so i had to use a bed pan to go to the bathroom. few things are less graceful than urinating in what looks like a shallow, plastic, upside-down cowboy hat while you're mostly horizontal in a bed and connected via wires and 5 electrode pads to a heart monitor.

every 8 hours i took my dilantin, 100 mg, in time-release pill form. i was given IV fluids to keep me hydrated and, although i had no restrictions on my diet, i was fed the blandest, most visually uninteresting food ever served. the truth was that i didn't have much of an appetite anyway, so it was probably for the best that they brought me food that i didn't care for.

on wednesday, when it started to be obvious that i wasn't going to be able to go home for another day or so, i began the process of letting people know. my father already knew, and had passed along news to family. stean knew, and had told a couple of our closest friends. i sat there in a hospital room in the middle of the day wondering who do i tell and how do i tell them. i didn't really call many people at first. i was in and out of the room all day having tests done. first a CT scan of my head, then an MRI. and finally an EEG.

and then they told me... there was something in my brain. i saw the MRI film--it was undeniably there--a smallish white thing in my left occipital lobe. what it was they couldn't say just yet--it could have been an abscess, or maybe a cyst, and of course, there was the possibility that it was a tumor. highly unlikely, they told me. most probably an abscess, and they could drain it easily enough, prescribe me some antibiotics, and send me on my way. but first, more tests...

so thursday i had CT scans of my abdomen and pelvis, and a test whose name i forget but that involved my remaining totally still for 42 minutes while a giant metal disc rotated slowly around my head. holy hospital bills, batman, i thank god that this didn't happen six weeks earlier, before my health insurance benefits kicked in with my new job.

and the questioning. constant questioning. most of the time the same questions... did you soil yourself during the seizure? have you been out of the country recently? do you have any prior history of seizures? do you abuse drugs or alcohol? have you hit your head recently? the answer to all of the questions was no. this all came completely out of the blue.

i was able to tell more people, and asked them to make some calls. friends came to hang out in the evening. i called my friend jessie. our phone conversation went like this:
emily: hey, um, so, i had a couple of seizures and i'm in the hospital now. there's something in my brain.
jessie: what? which hospital?
emily: graduate
jessie: i'll be there this afternoon.
and she was--took the train down from new york and stayed for two nights. took care of the dog and cats at night while stean stayed in the hospital with me.

i was scheduled for a biopsy for midday on friday. brain surgery. they'd put some sort of metal halo on my head and use a CT scan to set the exact coordinates for the drill to put a small hole in my skull, into which a small blunt needle would be inserted that would push the healthy brain tissue aside and puncture the unwelcome mass. then they would extract cells from the mass--if they got liquid, it's a relatively easy fix and everybody's happy. if they don't, then we start to have more serious conversations. early that morning i had the last of my tests done, a CT scan of my chest, which, like the scan of my abdomen and pelvis, was totally free of disease. this was a good sign, because it meant that there was no cancer elsewhere in my body that could have metastasized into my brain. i was hopeful that i'd get out of this experience with nothing worse than a small bald patch as a souvenir of the biopsy.

when the time came for the biopsy, my neurosurgeon (my neurosurgeon?!) asked me who i wanted him talk to after the procedure. i appointed stean and jessie and our friend joe. they rolled me into the operating room and i met the anesthesiologist and everyone who would be involved in the procedure, then they put me to sleep. i woke up with the halo on my head, en route to CT scan again. i remember the whole episode--i couldn't move at all because of my giant metal headgear. i had the scan, they took me back to the OR, i had just enough time to start getting nervous about the procedure before the anesthesiologist did his magic and i was out.

when i woke up, the halo was gone, my head felt dull and throbbed slightly, all was blurry (i didn't have my glasses with me), and one of the residents was there saying, "emily? everything went well, but it wasn't an abscess--we didn't get fluid."