I’d kept smiling, but my heart sank. Because if there were such a thing as luck, surely that would have protected me from having this happen in the first place. If I were lucky, I wouldn’t have been there in the recovery room, my spine like a lead pipe, the ever-present pain in my head only slightly dulled by narcotics, talking with this doctor about luck.
He’d said the 100 percent absolute best-case scenario—if I was lucky and everything went right and the CSF leak was fixed and I had no complications from the procedure and my CSF could be regulated without need for medication or draining or a shunt or repeat surgeries—was that it would take probably about a year to fully recover from the damage done to my brain.
A year.
I may not be lucky, but anyone who knows me knows that I’m fast, that I pride myself on being able to work fast; and so it’s probably no surprise to learn that even in my brain-compromised state, I’d seen this as a challenge.
A year? I’d thought. I’ll do it in six months.
I was wrong, but Dr. Kranz was right: Today it has been a year, and it has taken the full length of that year to heal.
He was also right about another thing: I got lucky.
Maybe not as lucky, in the Oscar-winning sense, as fellow CSF leaker George Clooney (who also acquired his leak in a much classier way: filming a stunt for a movie), but luckier than most people with spontaneous CSF leaks: I didn’t have an underlying condition that caused this (just the unlucky convergence of a really bad flu and a really bad cough); I was diagnosed (if not treated) quickly; and I was able to get to where a team of experts were, in North Carolina, with the help of family and friends. I had setbacks during my recovery—my fall, my hospital stay, insurance woes—but none so severe that they negated my subtle but detectable progress. I was able to live off savings and book sales while I was sick, while I convalesced, while I dealt with the daily life of parenting as best I could from bed, while I navigated a divorce, while I healed. All of this was luck, I now realize, in the middle of what I thought had to be the most unlucky time of my life.
A year later I am finally beginning to take for granted once again all the things I swore I never would, from the little things, like being able to sit up and read and write, to fully participating in the world again. This is the bittersweet part of healing, the forgetting. I try to remind myself, when I realize how careless I’ve become, of how privileged I am to be irritated by the boringness of some simple task that would have been far too complex for me to attempt a year ago, even six months ago. I try to remind myself that this is a measure of how much healing I’ve done.
I try to remind myself, too, that this isn’t the first time in my life I’ve had to start over. I had to start over as a pianist at the conservatory when my teacher had me focusing on playing just one note, relearning technique and starting at the beginning in a way that changed everything. I had to start over after being sick in college with Mystery Disease, learning how to live with pain, and then how to live beyond it. I had to start over after my time as a pianist was done, when I traded conservatory life and the study of music for working full time as an editor. I had to start over when I became a mother and my world shifted into the darkness of postpartum depression and the work of finding my way back. I had to start over when I stopped my full-time editorial job and instead took on full-time mothering and freelancing and book-writing. I had to start over after Nate’s accident, which unmoored me and left me groundless. So this isn’t the first time I’ve had to start over, not the first time I’ve had to engage in the process of rebuilding myself. I have had a million second acts, each one evolving out of complicated periods of pain and worry and vulnerability and acknowledgement that I didn’t know exactly what to do next, and each one of them bringing me to a new, deeper understanding, of realizing that I never feel more like myself than I do when I’m in the midst of learning what I need to do and where I need to go by doing it, by going there. This spinal CSF leak, which turned into this Year Zero of recovery, which is now turning into the unknowable landscape of Year One as Post-Leak Me, has felt like something new, like something unfathomable, like something that separated me from myself. And yet I see now that Post-Leak Me is as much Me as Leak Me, and New Mom Me, and Freelance Me, and Nate’s Accident Me, and Music School Me, and Sick Me.
This particular Year One is new, this is true. I haven’t lived through this kind of experience yet. I don’t know what the contours of this year will be, I don’t know how my life will be, I don’t know the shape it will take. I don’t know what it’s like to be healed from this brain injury, to be a single parent to my kids, to fully move on—not just yet. But I do know what it’s like to be lost, to be at a loss. I do know what it’s like to surrender to whatever comes next. I do know what it’s like to start somewhere and get to the other
