He’s hesitant to send me home, but he also keeps telling me it’s my call to be admitted to the hospital or not, and I can’t make the decision. Eventually I blink and I am walking back into the waiting area, finding my way to the elevator bank. Were the hallways this long when I came here this morning? I blink and I am walking out of the elevator. I see empty couches in the mezzanine and I lie down. My head is hurting so much I can’t think. I rest there for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one eye open as I text Gil to let him know the appointment went okay, that I need to see an ENT, that his colleague thinks this is a CSF leak, that I’m supposed to be in bed for the next 72 hours, drinking lots of caffeine for some reason.
I blink and I am outside in the blinding sunlight. Blink and I am on the sidewalk near a line of cabs. Blink and I am jostling, prone, in the backseat. Blink and I am putting the key in the lock, home, lying down on the couch to assuage the pain in my head until I can make it upstairs to my bed, where I am to stay flat, doctor’s orders, through the weekend.
5
Spontaneous is a funny word. Even in the context of the phrase “spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak,” the word sounds like such a happy thing, the kind of state of mind happy people always urge people like me to embrace. I hear “spontaneous” and I think jazz hands, last-minute concert tickets, manic pixie dream plans. Well, I did it, happy people. I got spontaneous. Or at least my body did.
That cough. I’d coughed the kind of cough where you can’t stop coughing, and people on the street stop to look at you bending over with the cough, trying not to vomit from coughing so much. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, except how embarrassed I’d be if I actually threw up right there, mid-crosswalk, on the way to breakfast; I just eventually managed to stop coughing, and I didn’t connect the dots to the headache that seeped in afterwards until now, when the doctors asked me if I’d experienced any trauma, an accident, even a really bad cough.
The neuro-ophthalmologist said that until they figure out what to do, I should lie down, and I should try to drink as much caffeine as possible—two things at which I naturally excel. So I’m doing that.
I listen to podcasts, play easy puzzle games on my phone; sometimes I listen to podcasts while playing easy puzzle games on my phone. The stories keep me company, even when I don’t have the attention span to follow them. I’ll drift off in the midst of nineteenth-century warfare and wake up to the technology of World War I; sleep in the middle of a talk about early twentieth-century American medicine and wake to a roundtable discussion of physics among speakers so British I can hear them stirring their tea.
It’s hard not to go back in time, hard not to retrace my steps. I keep thinking: If I’d just stayed home that weekend. But more than that: If I’d let them stay home that weekend. It would have been so easy to cancel my plans, to have my kids cancel theirs with their dad. Nate was already feverish when they packed up the car, and I’d felt it myself, the tickle in my throat, the prickle of fever on my skin, the beginnings. But I ignored it, sent them off with Advil, Tylenol, the thermometer, and my goodbyes. If I hadn’t, I could have taken care of him. We could have been sick together. I wouldn’t have gone out for breakfast, I wouldn’t have caught the wind in my throat and coughed so hard I sprung a leak. I might never have had a leak at all, because in the scenario where I would cancel my weekend plans to take care of a sick kid instead of making his dad do it, I wouldn’t have been selfish.
A part of me worries that this is actually true, that it could actually work like that, that spontaneous CSF leaks happen only to selfish people, that it is my fault, that everything is my fault, that if I could have just stayed happy and stayed okay and stayed in this marriage, then I wouldn’t be trapped in my head right now, anxious and terrified about what’s wrong, thinking endlessly about how I could have caused it, about how frustrating it is that even though it’s serious and real it’s still invisible to the doctors and they don’t know how to treat it, other than with bed rest and caffeine and a procedure one of the doctors openly referred to as “voodoo.”
But maybe this is a thing inside me that just happened to have happened, something that would have happened eventually anyway, something that could have been triggered at any time: doing headstands in yoga class, riding roller coasters, whipping my hair out of my face, being jostled by potholes in taxis or buses. Maybe it could have happened later, after the divorce was final, after I was off the good insurance. Maybe it’s for the best that it happened when it did.
This is what I mean, about my brain. Still desperately working to come up with reasons, with
