The morning of January 15, I use Waze to guide me to Inova Fairfax Hospital and proceed to a parking garage. There are no empty spots so I climb to the highest level and park on the open floor. I get out of the car and look around.
This feels so familiar . . .
I have a strange sense that I’ve been here before. But when it was, I just cannot remember.
I take the stairs down to the first floor and follow signs to the hospital, which seem complicated: up and down, left and right. These corridors, these elevators, these signs . . .
Have I been here before?
With each step I take, a feeling of uneasiness and mystery intensifies. I reach the receptionist’s desk in the waiting room. From my fogged memory, I seem to recall these places but cannot remember the circumstances that might have brought me here. After a while, I hear my name called. I lift my head and see a woman in the doorway.
“Oh my gosh, it’s you!” she exclaims. “I was sure you would never come back.”
I vaguely recognize her. Slowly, as if from some previous life, I recall her name: Theresa. When we walk into the therapy room, I recognize it, too, in a fuzzy, imprecise way.
Theresa asks me how I’ve been and what brought me back.
I try to explain. I tell her about my illness and treatments, about the tumors in my brain. I tell her that until just this moment, I didn’t have the slightest shred of memory that I’d visited this hospital before. I tell her I recognize her face and recall her name but not much else.
She smiles.
“We were all very sure you would never return,” Theresa says. “At your last visit, you were so angry and so dismissive of our advice. I told the staff we’d never see you again.”
When I cringe, she quickly adds, “I’m so happy you came back.”
Now the memories rush in. I recall arguing with her, my rude tirade, my refusal to listen. I remember storming out in anger.
I apologize over and over. I feel terrible about how I acted, but she comforts me.
“I understand,” she says kindly. “I’ve had patients before who refuse to go through this treatment because it doesn’t feel or look right to them. They prefer to suffer.” She takes a look at my arm. “Let’s get back to work.”
I sign up for twelve PT sessions, and over the next two months, I follow her instructions with devotion. I learn how to bandage my arm and order the special lymphedema garments that I need. I do everything she tells me, and my arm improves dramatically. One day, with a sly grin, Theresa tells me I’m her “most improved patient.”
As we work together for my recovery, Theresa and her colleagues become my dear friends. When I finally finish my sessions, we have tears in our eyes as we hug goodbye.
I am now remembering other things that happened in that period, albeit hazily. I recall the young pest-control guy who visited us—and how I angrily fired him when he couldn’t tell me what was in the chemical sprays he used. I remember the day I was lost in the street and peed all over myself.
And chanterelles are forever ruined for me. Once they were my favorite mushroom and one of my favorite foods, an emotional connection to Poland and a special part of my childhood; now, I can barely say the word aloud. The very name transports me back to that terrible day in the park. They prompt a kind of traumatic response, not just for me but for my family. Later, once I realized that my behavior that day was part of my mental breakdown, I begin to associate chanterelles with losing my mind. I worry it will happen again. It’s a fear that haunts me every day.
Nearly a year after the incident, when he can finally bear to talk about it, Mirek tells me that on that morning, he and Kasia worried that it wasn’t safe for me to walk briskly for seven-plus miles in the park. But when I insisted I was fine, they had ample reason to believe me, he says. Six weeks after the surgery in January 2015 to remove the brain tumor that had affected my vision, I had radiation to kill any lingering cancer cells around the surgical site and two tumors. The very next day, Mirek and I were on a twelve-hour flight from Washington, DC, to Hawaii, where we cycled two hundred miles and I participated in a 5K race.
Before we made the long trip, we’d asked Dr. Aizer, my radiation oncologist at the Brigham, if I’d be okay. “Absolutely! Enjoy yourself!” he’d answered. He was right; I suffered no ill effects from our ambitious vacation. A few weeks after that, I went cross-country skiing in New England with no problem. It was typical of me. In 2010, in the midst of chemotherapy for breast cancer, I’d gone downhill skiing in Colorado at an elevation of fourteen thousand feet, a helmet covering my bald head, and one arm so swollen from lymphedema that I was barely able to grip a ski pole.
With that personal history, it never occurred to me to rest after the CyberKnife procedure. And my family believed me when I said I was strong enough. To all of us, it seemed clear: walking in the park would be, well, a walk in the park.
Kasia now says that they all were so desperate to believe I would be okay—that I wasn’t going to die—that even she, a medical doctor, chose to ignore her concerns. “We wanted so much to restore the normal order of things, to get back to our normal life,” she says.
Of course, for other families not as obsessed with fitness as ours, the decision to exercise vigorously in the woods that day probably seems crazy. But it wasn’t crazy for us. My insistence that we
