Chapter Twelve
Bad News Brain Tumor
A few years before this trip, Lena was having really bad headaches. After a brain scan the doctor told us:
“Well, I have some bad news, some worse news, and some great news …”
I looked at him and frowned. “Is a good news/bad news joke really the best way to communicate this?”
“The bad news,” (he ignored me), “is that your wife has a golf-ball-sized tumor in her brain, and the worse news is that that’s not the cause of the headaches.”
“I’m glad there’s some great news, what’s the great news?”
“The great news is that I have a date with my sexy receptionist tonight!”
Ha ha. No, of course it didn’t actually go like that. In fact the doctor kept being vague until he made the mistake of having me drive over and pick up the latest brain scans. As soon as I got them in my hands, I pulled out the images, and using my neuroscience background and knowledge gained from reruns of General Hospital, I concluded that my wife had a golf-ball-sized tumor in her brain.
The doctors dug out the tumor (a “subependymoma”), and months later we discovered that the true cause of the headaches: Blood in her brain was ignoring the “One Way, Do Not Enter” sign on a vein. More sophisticated brain surgery at UCSF, and Lena was good to go.
She’s actually a little different since the operations. I don’t mean that she now answers to “Ralphie,” she’s just a little nicer and not quite so Type A. It’s like I got a new wife without all the complications of a divorce.
She’s also spatially challenged. We discovered this when Lena, Jenny, and I were leaving a restaurant, and Lena was heading into a closet.
“Where you goin’, Babe?” I asked (No, I don’t really call her “Babe”).
She was embarrassed about it, so she confabulated, and said “I was looking for the dinner mints.” So now, “Looking for the mints” is the code we use to refer to her spatial issues. For example, if Lena gets lost, and Jenny asks where Mom is, I’ll say “She’s looking for the mints.”
Something I learned from this experience, involving five operations and lots of time in the ICU, is that (and write this down because it will be on the test): Your worry level is related to the first derivative of your circumstances. That is, it’s related to the slope of the function of Circumstance Favorability versus Time.
For you non-overeducated people, I mean that your worry level is tied not to your circumstances, but to changes in your circumstances.
For example, your worry level is chugging along at the level that’s normal for you, say a 5 on a scale from 1 to 10. You find that your wife has a brain tumor and it shoots up to 10/10. But after a while, even though your wife still has the tumor, it settles down to a 5/10 again. In other words, you adapt to your new circumstances—your new normal. Then they operate successfully, and your worry level goes down to 1/10 (Yay!). But after a while, it will drift back up to 5/10.
Patrick McManus, author of such highbrow books as The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, put it this way: You always keep your worry box full. If something really bad happens, you empty out the small things, and put that big thing in it. If that big thing gets resolved, you dump it out, and fill up the box again with smaller worries.
You generally have a set worry level (or a set happiness level), and when things happen, that level will change for a while, but generally return to its regular set point. This is a valuable life lesson; it’s good to know that when something bad happens, you will probably regain your former contentedness level, even if things don’t improve.
The only problem I have with this idea is that, if true, there’s no point in trying to better your situation. You may as well just get a bottle of vodka and hang out in the gutter, because your level of happiness/worry is going to be the same no matter what you do. Someday I will have to test that out.