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CONTENTS
Chinese New Year 2010 .......................................................... 4
Not the Chest Surgery I Wanted .......................................... 5
It's Not Brain Surgery
CHINESE NEW
YEAR 2010
She asked if she could pray for me. I said yes. I never
said yes, but that time I did. She closed her eyes and
prayed for me, even as she was facing her own trials.
We all knew that everyone in the damn pink shirts
was here for a reason, after all. She even gave me a
little book when she was done, with her own name
and number written in on the back. In case I needed
to talk, she said.
I could have cried for it. Did cry, later in the day while
I waited for the doctor in pre-op, when everything
was finally too much for me to handle. I couldn't
explain why, hardly to myself and not at all to other
people. There was too much wrapped up in it.
I woke up in recovery with a stiff neck. That always
happens when I sleep wrong. My chest hurt, but my
throat hurt more, and I gagged and choked. I'm
grateful for it, in a way. As long as my throat hurts, I
don't have to think about what else does.
The doctor mentioned sending the remains to a lab.
Just to be sure, again, even though the biopsy already
came back benign. That was another week, still, and
the bruising and the scar, before I can try hard to get
back to not thinking about the parts of my body that
shouldn't be there, that aren't part of what's really
me.
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Words. She said words. That's really all I can tell you.
I called my girlfriend and then I spent twenty
minutes crying in a storage closet in my office.
A week later, I got a call from the doctor while
waiting for the bus. The second set of MRI results
showed a definite Problem and she was handing me
off to a neurosurgeon. My doctor asked if I was okay.
I told her yes, because I have to be okay.
It was starting to mess with my head a little (no pun
intended). The doctor told me to go to the ER if I had
a seizure or severe vertigo or a bad headache, "just to
be safe."
My first consult with the neurosurgeon went about as
well as a consult with a neurosurgeon can go. He said
the tumor looked benign and probably slow-growing
and congenital. Operable.
Later that day I told my girlfriend I was oddly
relieved, and she asked why.
If I had to have a brain tumor, I told her, I'd ended up
with one of the best possible options. Brain surgery
wasn't fun, no, but the doctor expected me to be out
of the hospital in less than a week and back at work
in a month. Compared to the people I'd read about
online who spent months or years recovering, yeah, I
felt lucky.
It's all relative.
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YES, MOM...
To top everything off, my mom messaged me on
Facebook to ask me how the MRI results were, and I
told her on there. I feel like a dick but it's fair if she
asked, right? And in tried-and-true, my-avoidantfamily fashion, she immediately changed the subject.
My dad called me the next day to ask a bunch of
questions I didn't know the answers to. I kept waiting
for him to say that he or my mom was going to come
out to see me, but no.
I called my parents as soon as I got out of the
surgeon's office with the details. Mostly all they could
keep saying was how they wished I was closer to
home. No reassurance, no offers to visit. My family
has never been particularly good at dealing with bad
news, but this was ridiculous.
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CYA
Arizona is a red, red state and I've read dozens of
horror stories about hospital care for LGBT
Americans. I worried a lot before each of my
hospitalizations. In both cases, however, I was
fortunate.
I was lucky for the hospital where I had my chest
surgery, which was extremely efficient and never
batted an eye when I designated my girlfriend as my
caregiver and handed over a medical power of
attorney.
I was lucky for the hospital where I had my brain
surgery, which was very nice and accommodating
and never gave my girlfriend a speck of trouble and
one of the nurses even overheard her refer to me as
"he" to a friend and asked me if I'd prefer male
pronouns. I told her it was okay because I was too out
of it to care but that was so above and beyond what I
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Brainflowers
by Jack Finch
starling.edge@gmail.com
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