Pain in the Brain

Quick recap: I'm a dufus that has made a lot of really dumb decisions that I can now blame on my (insert Arnold Swarzenegger voice here)....TOO-MUH!  Ok ok seriously.  I'm stuck in bed.  My husband left me.  I'd been on steroids for 3 weeks so I was eating everything in sight, my room was a balmy 40 degrees  because I was always burning up and I was covered in acne.    The local news station came out and did a story on my situation. I was a blubbering goofball on T.V.  I was the epitome of a Hot Southern Mess.  Be prepared, Im adding more pictures than usual on this post because a LOT happened.

September 17, 1996. Under the knife I was about to go though!  Doc told me prior to surgery that he couldn't make any promises because of where the tumor ( I can only say too-muh for some reason) was.  He said I may not make it, I could be blind, I could be deaf....he just didn't know what he would have to dissect to get there.  Off I went behind the curtain, leaving my mom, dad, father, granny, brother, sister and friends in the waiting room as the doctor prepared for a 9 hour surgery.  I was told to think of a happy place and I immediately thought of me laying on the beaches of Hawaii just a few years prior.  That was it......I was asleep.  Later I was told that I was one of the calmest he had ever seen for what I was about to go through.

Victoria giving our signature sign to each other

This was taken right after the first surgery

The pain was excruciating.  I've had migraines since I was 12 years old and this was 5 times worse.  As a helpful measure, the nice nurses hooked me up to a pain pump with a timer.  Dilaudid. Oh wait, they FORGOT to hook up the timer!!!  So instead of it only letting me get a dose when my allotted time was up, I got a dose EVERY TIME I CLICKED THE BUTTON.  That landed me in ICU after my mother found me gasping for air and my fingers turning blue.  Then that caused my mom to breakdown because she was helping me click the button since I couldn't reach it at times so she felt like she nearly killed me.  GAH- can't brain surgery be easier???  :)

My brother kept me walking, I kept him laughing.

Uh......well I tried!

My diet consisted of pureed food. BLEH.

Visitors from home.  Russell, Billy & Neely.

My Neel.  Still love her today.

I made it out of ICU and began to recover in a room.  Quicker than I wanted to I assure you.  My brother came to my bed and said "You're gonna get your ass up and walk because that's what is going to make you better.  So, get up."  (He said it lovingly)  Up I went and I walked and I walked.  Up and down the halls, doing ballet on the rails (not like I knew a thing about ballet) and singing the Rocky theme song as I punched my way down the hall.  I was a hoot. I had oral swabs stuck to my wall because after I swabbed my mouth, I would lob them to see if I could get them to stick.  A couple of the doctors would come to my room to hang out, eat my Pringles and watch TV with me when they got off work.  Might as well make it fun, right?  Only, I wasn't healing like I should.  Fluid kept building up behind my right ear where they sliced me open.  One. Two. Three total spinal taps.  It was then decided that I would need another brain surgery to alleviate the fluid build up. 

September 30, 1996: Surgery was started to put a shunt in place. A 7 hour surgery. They finally shaved my entire head (I still have the bags of hair).  Healing progressed more quickly then.  My notebook says "Ate grits, threw up.  Ate popsicle, threw up.  Danced with Julie, threw up. Walked, threw up."  So on and so forth for 4 days.  I wanted to eat SO badly.  I would lay there and think about the different foods I wanted to eat.  My brother kept a running list for me: big, fat, greasy sausage with thick syrup and canned biscuits, water, peanuts, Pepsi, baked beans & rice with salmon patties, turkey, Subway, Mom's chocolate fudge, sweet tea, Rolen's sheet cake, apple juice, Victoria's mom's potato salad, dressing, chocolate chip cookies, Grilled Glazed Red Lobster Salmon, Ensure Chocolate, fruitcake cookies and Chex snack mix".  I wasn't playin'.  I wanted FOOD.   Finally, a light scope was put down my nose to see if there was anything causing the irritation.  Whatever it was got fixed because then my notebook says "Ate English peas, carrots, baby food, hamburger, Pringles and 1 french fry." 

October 7, 1996: A tropical storm was forming off the coast of Florida but I had just been released from the hospital.  I wasn't staying.  Three weeks was long enough.  I was ready to go home.  Oh yeah, remember I told you my grandmother died while I was in Hawaii.  Well, my grandfather (her husband) died while I was in the hospital.  I found this out a while after I was released because no one wanted to upset me.

My Wonder Brother

When I got home, I walked into a house full of balloons and banners.  My brother did that.  He pushed me to work hard while I was in the hospital and he was there for the reward when I came home.  Guess who else had something to say about my return?  Chad.  Chad called almost every day to check on me when he found out David left me.  My parents adored him so once I was well enough to travel, we headed down to New Orleans to surprise him!  I stayed the weekend and then ended up coming back a couple of more times and eventually I just didn't come back.....

My life was changed forever.....

19 years old.  I was still living at home and going to community college as opposed to a university because I didn't want to leave my boyfriend.    I had good job at a high-end gift shop and had just started playing pool on the side.  Yes, pool.  Billiards.  Pockets.  Neely & I could talk trash better than anyone and most of the time, we could back it up! 

 We were both HUGE into Nascar as well.  The pic above was taken on a trip she and I took to Talladega.  We got into the driver's meeting, stood next to Terry Labonte and got some great pics of Dale Earnhardt, Kyle Petty, Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin!  I even got to DRIVE this Kodak car around the parking lot at Sams Club.  Mmmmmm, the rumble and the thunder of those engines was just awesome!!!

NOW........Try to go back in your mind to when you were 19 years old.

 (Its a looooong way for some!)

Imagine how you would feel if, upon waking up one morning, everything to your right was doubled.  Left was good but to the right there was two of everything.  Yeah, exactly.  I did what any stupid teenager would do.  I ignored it and headed down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with Chad.  DRIVING on the interstate, alone, with double vision.  (Not one of my finer moments)  When I got back into town, my vision was double not only to the right but had moved to the center and left.  It was time to tell my mom and see a doc.  I went to see an eye doctor who told me there was "possibly" a tumor there and I needed to go see someone else.  I ended up having an MRI done.  Here's a fun part.....

Ya know back in the day when people had house phones?  Well, the neurosurgeon over my MRI called one afternoon.  My mom and I picked up the phone at the same time.  I listened to see if it was for me and I heard that it was the doctor's office.  I stayed on the line.  All I remember after that is hearing "Im sorry but your daughter has a lesion on her brain.  We need to see her."  I don't know how I didn't pass out but I do remember thinking that I was going to die and I was scared to death. The visit to the neurosurgeon post MRI didn't help any.  He couldn't tell me many specifics and wasn't sure if it was operable or not.  I was turned over to another doctor with a follow up MRI.   This test showed that what I had was a blood-vessel type tumor but it was IN my brain stem.  It had ruptured and the blood from the tumor surrounded my optic nerve, causing the double vision.  To be sure, I was handed off to another doctor, at Shands in Gainesville.  That doc told me I had the "10 foot pole" syndrome, meaning my condition was so delicate that no one would touch me with a 10 foot pole.  Yay me.  I was told however that those tumors are usually inactive and once ruptured, it probably wouldn't cause any more problems.  My vision corrected itself within 2-3 months and I was back to the party world. 

By this time, Chad and I had broken up and I was hanging out with a friend from school that was home on leave from the Marines.  We hit it off fairly well and I ended up going to Hawaii to spend 3 weeks with him during Thanksgiving.  My grandmother died while I was away.....

When I came back, it was partying from the time I got off work, through the wee hours of the morning (sometimes not sleeping) until I had to be at work the next day.  I kept a bottle of Absolut in my car.  One night at Pockets, I was a little TOO tipsy and I could barely function.  I saw this girl that I knew from other friends, went up to her and asked her to take care of me.  My friendship with Victoria was born.  More parties ensued and we ended up getting an apartment together just so we could come and go as we pleased!  (I won't even go into the golfers, Slicky.)  More parties.  More alcohol.  It was just more, more, more all the time!  This does NOT need to show a bad impression of Victoria.  I was perfectly capable of making my own bad decisions.  :)

And then I met David. David Danny Miller.  My parents didn't care for him and neither did Victoria.  I shouldnt have either but what did I do? I went and married the boy.  Married!  At 22.   He was in the Coast Guard so we moved to Mobile where he was stationed.  I won't say that we didn't love each other and didn't have good times.  We did but we were toxic to each other.  The relationship escalated to physical confrontations yet I stayed.  (And I always wondered why my mother never left!!!)   

SO, I'm 22, living in Mobile and working at Red Lobster.  I woke up one morning to get ready for work and when I stepped out of bed, I fell down.  My whole left side was paralyzed.  My head was KILLING me.  Where was David?  Well lets just say he wasn't available to take me to a payphone, since we didn't have a phone in our apartment.  I drove myself, with full double vision again, left side semi-paralyzed and a blinding headache.  I called my mom who called my neuro and was told to get back home immediately and go straight to the ER.  It wasn't easy, but I got there.  My tumor had ruptured, again.  This time the plan wasn't to leave it alone, it was to find someone brave enough to remove it.  Problem?  Pre-existing condition.    So my mom did what any mom would do in that situation.  She researched and searched and begged for SOMEONE to help me so I could have my surgery.  Three weeks I was on total bedrest and my husband had just left me because "I should marry my mother since I was letting her do everything for me."  Yeah, ok.  Anyway, since I worked at the gift shop, a lady that also worked there worked for our congressman.  He was able to get me emergency medicaid/medicare (whatever it is) to pay for the surgery as long as someone would pay for the hospital.  RED LOBSTER stepped up and paid for the hospital so I was set.....ready to go get my noggin fixed.

But of course, nothing is that easy, right???