When my sister arrives, I stand up from the wheelchair and walk for the first time since going in to my procedure. Suddenly the gravity is different on this planet. I move so slowly, and my back feels so tight. We both laugh as I attempt to walk through the hospital’s massive revolving door: It’s a rotating chamber, wide enough to fit a gurney or several wheelchairs at once, moving so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible, and yet I can barely shuffle fast enough to get through it. I walk so slowly that the door catches up with me, pushing me out into the world, my discharge papers and prescriptions in hand, the one “in case of emergency” prescription still folded, placed for safekeeping in a zippered pocket of my purse, which is too heavy for me to carry.
I lie down in the passenger seat, as reclined as possible, and Jessie drives us back to the hotel. The walk from the car to our room takes hours, it seems. I can’t carry anything, and Jessie goes back and forth several times, ferrying things between the car and the room, in the time it takes me to baby-step my way there just once. Once I’m installed in the hotel bed, propped up on pillows, Jessie leaves to fill the prescriptions. The pain medication from the morning’s procedure is wearing off, and Tylenol is not helping. She calls me from the pharmacy: evidently my COBRA insurance has not kicked in, and the medication must be bought at full cost. I authorize her to buy it anyway, and she does, bringing me home Norco (a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocdone, for the pain) and Zofran (also known as ondansetron, for the nausea), along with low-sodium snacks and foods for me to eat when I can.
The Norco sends me into a lovey, overly affectionate daze—Jessie wisely takes my phone away from me after I begin texting everyone I know, telling them that I love them and that they’re the best, and laughs when I answer her question of how the medication is affecting me by telling her, “You know the feeling you feel, like, right after you have sex? That’s what this feels like!”—but the effects only last for so long. The more I take it, the less good I feel, and eventually taking it makes me feel bad, causing me anxiety and paranoia, and so I stop and revert to plain old Tylenol, taking the Norco only when I can’t take the pain any longer.
By the next afternoon, when Dr. Kranz calls me to follow up, I am in full-blown rebound high pressure. My head feels like a pain-filled balloon attached to an aching lead pipe, I am nauseated from the pressure and pain, my eyes hurt, everything hurts. He reminds me to find that sweet spot, that thirty-degree angle of uprightness in bed that can help me tolerate the pressure and pain. He still says to hold off on the Diamox, to not fill that prescription yet, to try to keep managing things without. This may be the worst of it, he says, and perhaps I can ride it out until my body starts to adjust. He says he’ll call back the next day to see how I’m doing, reminds me to take the Zofran to deal with the nausea, to avoid caffeine and sodium.
I’m cleared to take a shower by this point, but I can’t lift my arms over my head to take off my shirt. I try to put my hair in a ponytail, but even that is excruciating. It takes several attempts, and I have to take breaks during each try. The space between my shoulder blades is particularly heavy, and reaching my arms up sets it on fire. I return to the bed and take more medicine and my sister brings me food and I try to will my body to adjust, to stop ballooning my head with fluid, to stop flooding that fluid along my spine and aggravating the site of the leak.
Dr. Kranz had said that even though they couldn’t visualize the leak through imaging, it was likely that it was in my thoracic spine, somewhere between my shoulder blades, and I feel it there now, the burning, the pressure. An ice pack helps; being slightly propped up instead of flat helps. My dura is so tight, with my blood clotted and coiled around it, that I have instant feedback about what strains it: my chin down as I look at my phone, my posture slumped when I stand up. These things trigger a jolt of pain, and I am reminded to keep my chin up, or at least neutral, to stand with my back straight.
The drive back to Philadelphia is long and bumpy, despite the pain meds. We listen to podcasts and talk a little; I am uncomfortable and in pain, worried that every jolt will undo the procedure I had done, drifty with the medication, grateful for my sister’s patience and help. Once home, every step is a challenge. I’d forgotten the existence of stairs in my house, had never before considered them a provocation. But now they are an unclimbable mountain. Jessie helps me inside, carrying my
