Before the Sun Rises...

Ex-roommate!

It was 12 years ago today, but it still feels like that morning. A damp, cold, gray, Colorado winter morning when the sun had yet to rise and peak through my shutters stirring me from sleep. Instead, the high pierced shrill of a phone performed the sun’s daily ritual.

With receiver pressed firmly against my ear, an uneven, sterile voice greeted (if you could call it that) me. The unfamiliar, gravelly voice delivered a fate I still carry to this day and will until my last breath.

It only took four words.

“You have a meningioma,” the hollow voice uttered.


“A whaaaat?!” I stuttered back.


“A BRAIN TUMOR,” the voice continued, sending chills down my spine.


How do you even spell that I wanted to know as I desperately rifled through my nightstand drawer in search of a pen, a pencil—ah, heck my Mac Spice lip liner would do.


Men-in-gioma sounds more like a group of guys test-driving the latest foreign import, with all the bells and whistles, not to mention the 2.9% available financing option.


If only it could have been that simple.


The line went dead.


But surely it was me who was dead. I had become that damp, cold, gray Colorado winter morning.


Just hours later, I sat in horror as my newly appointed neurosurgeon explained the MRI I’d had the night before. Never-before-heard terms soared over my head.


Middle third sphenoid wing meningioma.

Cavernous sinus.


Lateral ventricular compression.


You’d have to be a brain surgeon to understand any of this stuff. Thankfully, the man in the overly starched, white lab coat standing in front of me was.


I forced myself to look at the snapshots of my illuminated brain. Images of a baseball-sized mass glared back at me in defiance. My husband was a major league ballplayer at the time, but I never imagined I’d be looking at the equivalent size of one in my head. Surely there had been a mix up. I was healthy, only 32 and trying to start a family. Maybe this explained my struggles to become pregnant the past year.


“You’ve probably had this tumor for over a decade,” my neurosurgeon solemnly announced.


“A decade!” I choked. I had had a “roommate” living inside of my head for 10 years? The only roommates I ever recalled having were back in college and graduate school, who shared their English Lit notes with you and gave you aspirin and a glass of water after a night of one too many beers.

I couldn’t get out of my head the Kindergarten Cop scene in which Arnold Schwarzenegger shouted, “It’s not a tumor!” I so wanted to believe this. But this wasn’t a fictional movie.

It was real life and it was mine. Surgery would be long and risky, but I didn’t have a choice. In just 8 days I would have a word I never thought would be in my vocabulary--a craniotomy.

To be continued...

p.s. And instead of a damp, cold, gray morning....we're in the middle of a blizzard!