The traffic is heavy that morning, and it takes forever to get to the hospital. The streets are clogged with cars moving very slowly in deep snow, and there’s more snow in the forecast. Finally, we arrive. My whole family is with me, including Jake, who’s joined us after leaving the boys with his mother in New Haven.
In the late morning, we enter a large area with semiprivate cubicles furnished with couches and comfortable armchairs; these provide families some privacy as they wait for their loved ones to come out of surgery. My family has brought all kinds of things to entertain themselves with: books, games, computers. They were told the wait could be long—the blizzard may have contributed to the delay—and two or three hours pass before I’m even taken back to the pre-op area. But we are all in good moods, joking and chattering as if we are at a party, abuzz with nervous energy.
When they call for me, I head into pre-op with Mirek and my sister. There, I’m examined by the nurse, meet the anesthesiologist, and visit again with my surgeon Dr. Dunn. Far from being scared, I feel immense relief that the surgery is finally happening, that I soon will be under anesthesia and won’t know or remember anything.
A nurse administers a strong sedative as I sit in the pre-op room and soon I begin to float away. I embrace the darkening of my mind, unaware that this brush with oblivion is only the beginning of my long and dangerous journey.
3
Into My Brain
As soon as I am unconscious, Dr. Dunn drills into the back of my skull to reach the bleeding tumor in the occipital lobe. He finds the nasty raisin relatively easily; it’s growing between the folds of my primary visual cortex.
With the help of his surgical team, Dr. Dunn scoops out the tumor and suctions out the blood. He replaces the portion of my skull that he removed to gain access to my brain, seals the bone with titanium screws, and stitches me up. To keep the sutures intact, he folds the skin of my scalp and rolls it along the five-inch incision so that it looks like a fat earthworm glued to the back of my head. Later it will flatten out into a neat scar.
A few hours later, I open my eyes.
The first thing I notice: I can see! I’m not blind! I can see everywhere, in all my visual fields—left, right, up, and down. I gaze around the hospital room testing my eyesight, raising my fingers in a V shape and moving them into each of the four visual quadrants like my doctors did before the surgery. No problems; none! I can see the V no matter where I place it! No vanishing hand, no blocked fields, nothing abnormal. The tumor and bleeding haven’t caused permanent damage to my occipital cortex.
I’m so relieved—but for one detail.
Dr. Dunn informs us that the tumor appears to be metastatic melanoma. We’ll know for sure in a few days after we get the results from the lab. In the meantime, all we can do is stew over the idea that, just as we feared, I am most likely battling this dreaded type of cancer all over again.
Melanoma is the rarest but most dangerous form of skin cancer, diagnosed in about 130,000 people each year, most of them fair-skinned like me. It develops from melanocytes, skin cells that carry a dark skin pigment called melanin, which protects deeper skin layers from the damaging effects of the sun. Many melanomas begin as moles, harmless growths of melanocytes that can turn cancerous over time. Once that happens, melanoma has a propensity to metastasize, often spreading from its original site in the skin to lymph nodes and organs, especially the lungs, liver—and brain. When it spreads there, it’s almost invariably terminal.
For all we know, I’ve been handed a death sentence.
We have no doubt I’m going to die. My family and doctors and I are certain of it. We don’t discuss it aloud, but the terrible reality of it lingers among us.
That night, Thursday, January 29, my exhausted family heads to my sister’s house while I stay in the hospital to recuperate. As I lie in bed, I feel no pain—but I cannot sleep. I’m loaded with steroids to prevent swelling in my brain, and one of the side effects is insomnia. I’m wide awake, my mind exploding with memories.
In this dark hour, the intensive care unit nurse who is monitoring me pulls up a chair next to my bed and sits down. As the snow falls outside the window, words spill out of me. I tell her things I’ve never shared before, painful stories I thought I’d left behind in Poland. I talk all night.
The next morning, Witek and Cheyenne are the first to arrive. In the quiet of my hospital room, I share these stories with them too. I’m sure I am going to die, and I want them to know my history, which is their history as well. I especially want Witek to know more about his father, Witold, a brilliant computer scientist.
I also have a selfish reason for telling these stories: I need to express my fear about what is happening within my body, to give voice to the family history that is now repeating itself in the most painful way. Because when my son was only seven years old, his father died of the very type of cancer I now appear to have: melanoma that metastasized to the brain.
Witek was still a toddler and his sister, Kasia, a five-year-old when my husband told me the news. It was June 1980, a hot and sunny day in Warsaw, Poland. I was twenty-nine years old, a young wife and mother, cutting up vegetables to make dinner, when Witold walked into our home, his face contorted with fear.
The words that poured from him were so dreadful I could barely process them.
