How To Survive Being Sick

September 2018, Chicago

I had just completed a year abroad teaching English in Guangzhou, China.

It had been a year full of new friends, students, travels and great food but I was homesick. I missed my family and more importantly, my dog, April. So, I was eager to return home.

I was also coming home with my boyfriend, who had graciously joined me on this quarter-life crisis expedition.

He was on leave for a few weeks but would return to Guangzhou to begin a new role as senior teacher. I wanted him to stay in Chicago with me but he had been offered a promotion. I didn’t want him to miss out on a good opportunity. Plus, we’d been through so much as a couple…long distance seemed like it would be a small blip.

October 2018

After much pestering from my Mom and the looming reality that I was turning 26 (my insurance was about to expire), I agreed to get an MRI.

I had had one every year prior to monitor a benign brain tumor that was found in 2014. It had never changed or grew or did anything, so I wasn’t keen to waste a Saturday morning laying in metal tube listening to distorted robot screams and loud banging for 45 minutes.

Soon after? 2018

I get the results of my MRI and I’m in disbelief.

It’s bigger. Not extraordinarily bigger but…now what? Is that bad? Do I do something now? I’m panicking. I imagine phantom symptoms of compromised balance.

(I am just clumsy).

I meet with my neurosurgeon. He talks me through a non-invasive procedure called targeted radiation. I decide to be proactive.

January 2019

They screw a metal frame into my head.

I feel like this part of the procedure was glossed over when I was being briefed. Despite the amount of lidocaine injected into the crown of my head, the pressure of the screws twisting into my skull is indescribably strange. It’s just sheer pressure.

It’s a whirlwind type of clausrtophobia. It doesn’t hurt but it certainly feels like there’s a metal frame that’s scaffolding my head.

I’m trapped in new construction.

I wait. I get more imaging. Then, I finally I lay in a MRI type machine in complete silence.

After fifteen minutes or so, I’m done. I don’t get to keep the metal frame and I go home. I sleep the rest of the weekend and clean the little holes in my head. I return to work on Monday as an ESL teacher. I don’t notice any side effects. I feel fine.

April 2019

My boyfriend and I break up.

We’ve grown apart without realizing it. I’ve just started a job as a leasing agent but I quit the day after we break up. I’m pretty shocked but I don’t want to deal with it. I pretend it’s not really happening. My mom takes me to Olive Garden. I don’t want to grieve. I don’t want to talk to him about it. I disassociate pretty effortlessly.

June 2019

We’re a week or so out from my six month follow up with my neurosurgeon.

I’ve recently changed jobs. I’m a receptionist. I answer the phones, I organize mail, I refill the bowl of mints, I listen to office gossip and scan documents. I talk angry old people down from their rage of CBD products being sold in our video rental stores. I’m not as persnickety or social as a typical receptionist. I like to eat lunch alone in my car. I could proabably make more of an effort. I feel fine, though.

Early July 2019

I start to feel a stiffness in my jaw.

Then within a day or so the entire right side of my face is completely immobile.

I’m at work at the time. I go into the bathroom and try to manipulate my face but I’m unable to move it on its own. I can’t smile. Or grin. Or move my eyebrow. My right eye doesn’t close all the way. It's tearing. I leave work early and go to my primary care doctor. I’ve already googled my symptoms and it’s either an impending stroke or Bell’s Palsy. My doctor think it’s Bell’s Palsy and prescribes me prednisone.