Remarkably, this ungraceful tumble down the stairs has bruised my ego and my butt, but not my spine. I move toward meeting my six-month milestone with bruises along a spectrum of deep purple to a nauseating yellow, but with no leak, or at least no leak symptoms. My wisdom tooth decides it has had enough, and tries to escape my head, the pain of which feels like a kidney stone in my jaw and reduces me to tears. Those old pain-scale questions from the headache center now suddenly have a true context: I have found my 10/10 pain, my worst can’t-go-on-living pain, and I gain a new respect for my old leak headache, which felt awful and omnipresent, but at least had the common decency to only ever reach a 9 at its worst. I have the tooth extracted, a process I’ve been fearing and putting off for years, and I sit tentatively, almost hovering in the dentist’s chair, my butt tender from bruising, my head on fire from tooth nerve pain, my neck and spine anxious to prevent flexion or stress on my dura. Afterward I’m given instructions to follow once I get home to care for the wound site, and these instructions are so thrillingly straightforward, so incredibly practical, so amazingly limited in time and scope, it is a true relief. I’m almost excited to go through this particular healing process, which at no point will involve any fear whatsoever that coughing or sneezing or bending wrong or falling down the stairs will cause my tooth to grow back and hurt me again.
My friend Nina’s path continues to diverge from mine. She suffers no fall down the stairs, no rogue tooth requiring extraction, and yet her slide back into leaking symptoms continues unabated. By the time of her six-month milestone, she is almost 100 percent certain she is leaking again. All of her high-pressure symptoms are gone, and the rhythms of her life have returned to what they were when she was leaking. The headache a heavy weight at the back of her skull, the fatigue and exhaustion and pain upon standing, the tinnitus and blurry vision, the brain fog. “It is what it is,” she tells me. “At least it’s better than being in that awful rebound high pressure. At least I know what to do when I’m leaking. That’s a comfort, at least.”
In July, a month after Emi turns 17, as I meet that six-month milestone, she and I take a trip together, the first big, sustained thing I have been able to plan and manage in over a year. She has just finished her junior year of school and is beginning the process of applying to college. She’s decided she wants to go to art school, and her top choices are Parsons, at The New School, in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island. She’ll be doing a three-week summer school program at Parsons, living on campus and taking classes, a kind of mini college experience, during the last three weeks of July. And so we decide to take a trip up to RISD the week before that, over the Fourth of July weekend, to tour the school and visit friends in the area. It is just Emi and me, the two of us having a bonding weekend together. It reminds me of the weekend she’d suggested we have after Nate’s accident, how she longed for some time together, just us, to help us heal from the trauma. This trip is also serving a healing purpose, the two of us connecting again, just us, in the aftermath of a different kind of traumatic experience.
We are traveling by train from Philadelphia to Providence, which means five hours of sitting, a marathon of sitting, the most sitting I have ever done at this point in my recovery. I plan accordingly. I bring my ice turbans and a travel pillow, plus a special angled pillow to sit on to help my back. I plan to take breaks, to stand up and walk the train aisles when sitting gets to be too much. I take a rolling suitcase Emi will be able to lift for me if necessary. I pack the medicines I might need: a diuretic my neurologist has recommended, to help with the high-pressure headaches I’m still dealing with; some lorazepam in case of sensory overload.
Traveling is stressful. I’d underestimated how much of my recovery and progress has been dependent upon the predictability and calmness of my daily routine at home. Here, out in the world, with so much new input, both visual and aural, my brain strains under the weight of so much heavy lifting. I find myself exhausted and overwhelmed, trying to put a brave face on it for Emi while also trying to find places to rest. But we manage to have fun, shopping in the deserted downtown mall, every place a ghost town due to the holiday weekend; laughing over trash TV and comedies at the hotel; gossiping over her social group’s summertime social media habits. We go to the school tour, and I stand through the introductory session, as I have had my fill of sitting after the marathon train ride. Emi and I both stand out: me due to my being the only person standing up, provoking confused looks from other parents, who gesture to open chairs as an offering for me to sit down; and Emi due to her hot-pink hair. I’d expected more startling hair colors at an art school campus tour, but so far we’ve only run into a few other kids with bold hair choices: turquoise, royal blue, a faded purple strand here and there.
We follow the group we’re assigned to on the tour, and the campus is beautiful, a tiny town of classroom buildings. Everything that is described to us about the course of study and the opportunities for
