The way out for me is less clear-cut. I can’t see my way through to the end point of my recovery, where this part of my life will be a memory. It’s like trying to look through a one-way mirror, and only seeing myself reflected back at me. Time, my doctors tell me, is the only data point they have to offer in terms of what will make me heal. Time and luck, both as fragile as glass.
Deep in the brain, hidden in the dark recesses, is a small gland, shaped like a pinecone and about the size of a grain of rice. It’s the only part of the brain that stands alone, unpaired: In the midst of the mirror-image left and right hemispheres, tucked into the center where the two halves of the thalamus meet, the pineal gland sits, singular. It, like the rest of the brain, is bathed in cerebrospinal fluid; in the case of the pineal gland, this is supplied to it by the nearby third ventricle. Its small size belies its importance: It is an endocrine organ, responsible for governing our sleep patterns and circadian rhythms, a feat it accomplishes by producing melatonin. The timing and amount of melatonin it produces is triggered by cycles of darkness, when it produces more, and light, when it produces less. And so in that sense it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the pineal gland, sequestered though it might be in the darkest, deepest center of the brain, as far as possible away from light, is actually light-sensitive, a deep-brain nonvisual photoreceptor. Our retinas perceive light, and pass this information along to a part of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which relays this information to another group of neurons in the hypothalamus called the paraventricular nucleus, which relays this information to the spinal cord and superior cervical ganglion, which, finally, relays this information to the pineal gland. Well before this process was understood, however, the pineal gland was a subject of intrigue for anatomists, philosophers, and mystics alike. Descartes called the pineal gland “the seat of the soul”; the nineteenth-century Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky suggested a connection between the pineal gland and the Hindu concept of the all-seeing “third eye,” the Ajna chakra. Taoists call this area, where the pineal and pituitary glands are located, “the crystal palace.”
A palace made of glass.
This crystal palace in the brain is a fragile information system, sending and interpreting signals, responding and regulating, all of it built and functioning without the awareness of the mind. In fact, the work of the brain goes on entirely without the mind, which is its own glass palace, its own hall of mirrors, alternately a telescope, a magnifying glass, a portal, a boundary, a microscope, a prism of focus, a fibrous cable of information, a thin pane through which to view the world.
The fragile work of illness and recovery, the fracturing of the crystal palace in my brain, and its self-repair, reminds me of the dual nature of glass, the strength and clarity of it, the breakable nature of it. The way that glass is neither pure liquid nor pure solid, but rather exists someplace between those two states.
This breakdown of my marriage, this sudden and mysterious and debilitating illness, is my own version of the glassmaker’s kick in the butt—the realization of my own pain, the undeniable nature of my very real physical pain, the legitimizing of my emotional pain—shattering the delusion that pain is a thing from which I can protect myself or anyone else. My being frozen in place, as still and smooth as glass, doesn’t save me from being shattered, just traps me in perpetual fear of shattering. And so, like Emi with her photographs, like Nate with his questions and clarity, like the glassmaker finally being freed, I must allow myself to move. To feel. To remind myself that it’s okay to cry a little when I talk about it. To inhabit the place where I am both liquid and solid, fluid and in stasis, fixed and in the process of becoming, reflecting, refracting, and revealing this new self I am just now beginning to understand.
27
January 2016
With its low buildings and valet staff on hand as soon as we pull up the day of my tests, Duke University Hospital strikes me as resembling the hotels surrounding it, albeit with less signage about its daily rates. Just inside the entrance, hanging over the entryway to the main lobby, is a curved plexiglass banner of sorts that reads “Welcome to the Duke Experience.” The Duke Experience sounds less like a way to describe a hospital visit than it does the name of a competitive college a cappella show choir, and it amuses me to imagine the medical professionals, in their off-hours, working to tighten their harmonies and choreo for Nationals.
It’s a surprisingly straightforward path to the radiology department, no elevators or endless hallways to negotiate, just straight through the lobby with its leafy plants and shiny piano, and then a left at the elevator bank, and then another left, and there we are at the check-in desk, where friendly administrators tell me in the kindest way
