A few weeks after that, you can agree with your husband that it’s time to tell your kids that you are getting divorced, even though by this point you can’t really sit up anymore, because being upright brings on the relentless back-of-skull headache, and even when you lie flat in bed the world seems tipsy, you feel tipsy, that sense of drunken confidence flooding you even as you’re aware you might not be saying things the way you meant to, and you can’t not cry when your daughter turns away and starts texting her friends, when you ask your son if he has any questions and he says “Yes. Can you not get divorced?”, when your head hurts so much the pain is all you have room for and you can’t absorb theirs the way you’d planned to before, when your brain was all yours.
You can do things like this because at this point you don’t know you’re leaking cerebrospinal fluid, you don’t fully know what’s going on, and you have yet to realize what a problem that is, because the thing you use to think with is the very thing that’s problematic.
The problem you have, when you have a problem with your brain, is that your brain doesn’t necessarily realize that it’s having a problem. It keeps trying to strategize, rationalize, keep you in motion. It keeps supplying you with ideas, convincing you with plausible excuses, explanations. Like: You’re fine! See how normal you feel when you stay completely still and flat and close your eyes and don’t move? Just keep doing that! Or: People have headaches all the time! Go ahead and cook dinner, just take breaks by lying on the floor, that’s a smart solution! You got this!
But you’re not thinking, exactly. You’re in a fog, and all the time you’re floating on the surface of things, you’re padded, your real self stuck inside this swollen busy-work instructive primal machine that’s taken over to keep you moving, and ideas float to you from somewhere and your uncushioned brain just says, Yes, it makes sense to lie down here in the middle of the kitchen floor while you wait for the timer to go off so you can stand up and drain the pasta and then lie down again for a few moments before you have to add the sauce, that’s normal. Your brain says, It’s okay, remember, this is just a thing that happens now, like how when you lie down and close your eyes you can’t feel your arms anymore. Your brain tells you, It’s fine to be curled up here in the chair unable to open your eyes while these five doctors talk at you, just nod your head, they deal with sick people all the time, you’re probably not being rude, while the experts are telling you “Your call, you decide” whether or not to be admitted to the hospital, to have surgery, to stay home, to wait it out. And all along your brain is doggedly continuing to try to make sense of it all, the way it does in a dream, the way dream logic seems so right until you wake up.
When exactly do I wake up?
3
In the doctor’s offices, I recite my history like an incantation. There is a rhythm to it now, like an ancient spell, and I have learned the True Speak of the medical wizards: I know which terms will unlock the vaults of understanding, which magical words—orthostatic, occipital—will make visible the thing I am conjuring, what syllables can transform me from a tired rambling woman into a wise witch, full of insight and secrets that could explain everything if they only listened true.
There is the truth of my experience, and the truth of the doctors’ diagnostic limitations. Even with machines they cannot see the small tear in the fabric of my reality. And yet my descriptions of what it feels like to lose my brain from the inside out are irrelevant to them, despite being the only thing relevant to me, the entirety of my comprehension. Everything is pain and confusion.
They speak in riddles, though I am aware there is no trickery intended. It is my brain, fluid-deprived and desperate, attempting to understand even the simplest of questions. I have always previously had the luxury of this being an unconscious, painless process. But now it is a trial. A prick of the finger on a spinning wheel, a hero’s journey, a boulder pushed up a mountain.
There are things I can say without thinking. My mouth opens and words come out, free-associated comments I am often only able to make half-sense of afterward, trying to cover my confusion with humor. I am able to fool some people; they aren’t able to sense my panic, my terror at not knowing who is speaking when I hear myself talking out loud.
In the doctor’s offices I rely on the magic words I have learned in order to be taken seriously—sudden onset and no history of migraine, and, crucially, positional—and I repeat them, when I am asked, and the doctors nod at me and scribble, or type at a computer, and sometimes I am buoyed by the way they seem to be listening, and I tell my story with all the rich details I can muster, hoping that with my words I can convince them of the pain and terror and confusion they cannot see and cannot trace and even with their powers cannot fix. More often, though, I lie flat, staring into the fluorescent lights, lost in the patterns on the ceiling, the stains and crevices, tears choking my voice as I whisper whatever facts I can muster in response to whatever questions they ask.
Are these sorcerer’s riddles? Must I answer by not
