“I have bad news and bad news,” he says. The bad news is, we are not going to do the through-the-face surgery. He just doesn’t feel confident enough that that’s where the leak is. And the other bad news is that we can’t do the blood patch: The anesthesiology team isn’t set up for it; they say they don’t do them here in the hospital anyway, blood patches are done on an outpatient basis, in a clinic, which is in a different location. So after waiting all day, being hooked up to machines all day, after stressing all day over whether I’m making the right call, I’m free to go. The ENT says to call to set something up with the pain clinic where blood patches are done, but Gil isn’t having it. Something needs to be set up for us, and it needs to happen now. The ENT strolls out and Gil goes after him, and I close my eyes as someone takes my IV out, removes the blood pressure cuff from my other arm. Eventually Gil returns, a resident comes in to take my information to facilitate an appointment with the pain clinic, and I go through my history all over again. My hospital records will somehow show this waste of a visit as my having had actual surgery, a fact that will have to be corrected every time I review my history with a new doctor.
8
I am back in bed, as I have been for weeks and weeks now, flat on my back, unable to read or watch TV or even have conversations, just kind of floating in this fog, trying hard to think.
I can’t write—in my fog, I have that tipsy-drunk urge to chat, but also the tipsy-drunk cognitive impairment that makes typing almost impossible. Everything evaporates into the sensation of staring at the ceiling, because that’s mostly what I do.
It’s cruel, in a way, that I’m forced to have all this time and yet not be able to write. It’s almost exactly my fantasy—for once, I’m free of the endless stuff that’s never ever fully done: the chores and homework helping and school pickup and food preparation and dinner cleanup and laundry and housework and and and and—and yet I’m free from having to feel guilty, because I’m literally unable to do those things. It’s seemingly the perfect scenario: I could write and not feel guilty about someone else picking up the slack of all the things that are left undone.
Yet I can’t write, and no one’s picking up the slack. My brain is too bruised from banging around in my skull without a cushion to do anything, and during those rare times when I’m forced to venture downstairs, I descend to find that no one else has done anything either. Everything is exactly as I left it weeks before, a tribute to the last time I’d been upright: the cat puke a hard crust on the floor, the dust fortified into corners, the dishes towering unscraped in the sink. I feel torn upon seeing this, some faraway, fog-padded part of me feeling humiliated, angry; and yet at the same time strangely energized, the ever-rationalizing part of my brain telling me You can just clean everything up! What a great idea! as I attempt to straighten up the mess, so happy to have a project, some measure of usefulness. Until the headache reasserts itself with a vengeance, reminding me that I can’t trust my brain, that I shouldn’t ever think that anything I think is a good idea, and I go back to bed, where I’m greeted by the strange neurological punishments of having been upright: the nauseous rush, the pressure on the left side of my head that’s always followed by my arms disappearing and my words not speaking and my tears crying in too-loud sobs I can’t control.
I can’t write, but I can sometimes think, a little, about things I’ve written. Before this whole thing, I’d been working on a few projects. One was a novel set in the 1930s, during the Works Progress Administration era, about a pianist struggling to come into her own as an artist. Another was about a teen music prodigy who abandons her studies at a crucial point, runs away to meet up with a person she fell in love with on a video game server, tries to figure out who she is if she no longer does the thing she’s done her whole life. And another was about a young woman, training as a pianist at a prestigious conservatory, suddenly sidelined by a mysterious illness doctors struggle to diagnose but which she fears she’s brought on herself, fears she’s using as a way to hide from the difficulties of her life, fears she’s actually dying, fears she’s pretending to be a person who’s dying to escape having to be a person who’s living.
The larger trend of these stories and how they relate to my current situation is not lost on me.
I’d most recently been working on revising the 1930s novel, the one about the woman whose artist husband had forbidden her to play, and how she found her way back to music after repression, depression, a suicide attempt, hospitalization. I’d had feedback that the story felt “too small,” so I’d been working on trying to enlarge it. I changed the voice. I wrote a lot about time, the experience of time and how it changes when you’re performing music, and how it changes when you’re sick, when you’re in the alternate universe of medications and bed
