I’m brought back to a curtained area, patient spaces separated by curtains on tracks, like in an ER. Not a lot of privacy, but then the place is basically empty this early on a Monday morning. I’m given a gown to change into, leave it open in the back, and I lie down on the gurney, watching people walk purposefully past the undrawn curtains around my bed. The anesthesiologist returns with a tray of alarming-looking needles and another person, a medical resident, he says, introducing her. I’m momentarily alarmed: “Shouldn’t there be more people?” But no, he tells me. It’s a two-person job. And so they sit me up, my entire head a ball of pain, and the resident straps a rubber tourniquet around my arm and asks me to make a fist as the anesthesiologist swabs my lower back with something cold, then needles it in several places with lidocaine. Soon, the resident is extracting blood from my arm, blood that must be used immediately, and I am made to lean forward as the anesthesiologist hunts for the right spot to stab me in the back with a giant needle and deliver that blood.
“I can feel that,” I say at one point, as I lean on the resident’s chest and fight off the go-toward-the-light tunnel vision brought on by having my blood drawn and my back skewered, and the excruciating headache brought on by sitting up. “Some pressure?” the doctor asks. “No, the needle,” I say. “It’s just pressure,” he says. “It’s the needle, I can feel it,” I say. I start to pass out and they both yell questions at me to keep me awake. “How long have you lived here? What do you do? How many kids do you have? What did they do for you for Mother’s Day?” My arms are tingling and my brain feels like it’s getting smaller and smaller as I try to form words. Seventeen years, I can’t, I can’t, write books, I can’t, two, I can’t, I can’t, nothing, nothing, nothing, they didn’t do anything I can’t.
“How old are your kids?” The doctor asks me, and the irony of it finally hits me, my worry about this illness making me a bad mother, being caused by being a bad mother, by being weak. Dura mater is the full name of the thing that tore in me. It means “tough mother.”
They ask me to tell them when it’s too much pressure, and I cry as I feel the needle jabbing some nerve and a heaviness in my back and finally yes, it’s too much pressure, too much pressure in my back, too much pressure to be the one who has to decide how much pressure is too much pressure, to have it be my decision, my call, to have everything left up to me.
They lay me back onto the table and tell me I’m fine, that I did better than they’d expected (what had they expected?), and my headache is, for the moment, gone—but then it often subsides from lying down, so I can’t be sure it’s truly been banished. I’m foggy still, still unable to think like I used to be able to think, and exhausted from the blood pressure drop and the tears, and my back weeping what I hope isn’t blood, though I can see the floor dotted with it, smears and drops they haven’t bothered to clean up yet. I lie there on the cold table for an hour and then limp to the car to go home, my lower back and right leg a nerve map of pain. “You should be fine in a few days,” the doctor says before I leave. “If you’re not, we can do another one. Second blood patches have a success rate of over 95 percent.” I tell him that I hope I never have to have another blood patch ever again, but he just shrugs and smiles and says, “Well, let me know. It’s your call.”
Days after the procedure I am out of bed, my back heavy, my right leg twinging, because the doctor has called and told me to be out of bed, as I can tolerate it, and because I have noticed that now when I lie down, my headache—oh yes, even after this procedure, I still have a headache—becomes intolerable. This is normal, the doctor tells me, it is normal for my head to feel like a blown-up balloon, to feel pressure behind my eyes and nose, to feel the genuinely unpleasant sensation of something like a deadly python squeezing my brain. This version of the headache is the Opposite-Day version of what I’ve been experiencing up until now: It used to be low, infiltrating the base of my skull; now it’s high, in the front of my face. It used to improve a little when I lay
