It's election night, and I'd love to talk about that. Well, I wouldn't love it, but votes are being counted, and blood pressures are rising, and arguments are in the process of being formulated. S
o in that interregnum between voting, counting, and of course, arguing about voting and counting, I'm here to talk about brain surgery.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was scheduled to have brain surgery to relieve a blockage that was causing dizziness and asymmetrical hearing loss. That indeed happened on October 7, four weeks ago.
I expected to come here post-surgery with a plethora of possible topics. Maybe I'd talk about the rigors of nine-hour surgery, which is how long mine lasted. Maybe I'd talk about new portals of understanding that opened up to me. I'd even joked that maybe all that rooting around in my brain would enable me to wake up speaking a new language. But I can't do that.
Dare I use the word routine to describe brain surgery? I went under anesthesia at seven thirty AM, awoke at four forty-five PM with my wife standing next to my bed.
"How do you feel," she asked.
"Not that bad," I said. I had a headache, but deadlines have given me bigger headaches over the years. I was marginally dizzy, but no more than that. The hearing in my right ear, the bad one, wasn't any worse after the operation. I heard everything, unfortunately so since, as most of you probably know, hospitals are a symphony of beeping and buzzing noises from machines.
Every single doctor or nurse who stopped by in my room after the surgery asked me the neurological questions. What year is it? Who's president? Can you wiggle your toes? I thought the cleaning woman might go through the state capitals with me. I had no trouble answering correctly.
My son in Vermont called my wife right after I woke up and asked tentatively, "Is Dad okay?" She handed me the phone, and I offered my usual, "Yo, what's up?"
"Wait a minute, you're talking?" he asked incredulously in a tone that suggested, wait a minute, you're alive?
The next day, I walked, albeit slowly. No cane, no walker. I went to the bathroom by myself. I ate. My vitals were consistently okay, and so on the day after surgery, I began to legislate to go home. Now, Penn is a wonderful hospital where I got absolute comprehensive care, but like all hospitals, they want to get rid of you and open up a bed. So I was given my release two days after surgery instead of the expected four or five.
Once home, I'd love to tell you heroic tales of my rehab. There aren't any. Rehab from brain surgery involves avoiding strenuous activity, and so the question became, what's on Netflix?
And oh yes, drinking lots of ginger ale. Did you grow up as I did with parents who believed that there was nothing ginger ale couldn't cure? So the minute I got home, my wife made a ginger ale run, and I'm still drinking it under the premise of, you know, post-surgical care.
The one post-op effect was unexpected. I was given to sudden feelings of strong emotion, which can happen, I read. I would get choked up discussing the great care I got at the hospital, or I'd get teary-eyed at something stupid on TV. And at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, John Candy comes home with Steve Martin as Every Time You Go Away plays. Man, I was a puddle of ginger ale.
So there was a psychological side to this experience. I do believe that going into surgery with a positive attitude is important, and the support of family and friends helps immensely, but this experience to me is a medical story. The know-how and expertise of doctors who can take something as frightening and potentially life-altering as brain surgery and turn it into, well, Wednesday.
I am deeply grateful we live in a place where this can happen, and in a place where they keep re-running Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
