noxious facts and concepts

I’ve been avoiding this.
Coming here, saying things.
My creativity is momentarily shot. I find myself needing others to make an effort to communicate with me, any incentive for relationships left foggy and insubstantial. But I know I can’t just shut the world out. So I am forcing myself to do this.
All I have left in my brain are the same few noxious facts and concepts bouncing around. Well, them and the lesion.
A lesion being some kind of physical anomaly that shows up on a CT scan and got me referred me to a neurologist last week who was an insensitive jerk who told me that I probably have an malignant tumour in my frontal lobe. Then he told me that my head will be poked, prodded, drilled into and cracked open to remove said tumour. Then he changed his mind and told me that nothing’s for sure until I get an MRI, but that it could be much bigger than the tiny one centimetre in diameter dense white spot in the front of of my frontal lobe that showed up on the CT scan.
Then he told me (but only when prodded) that it also may very well just be benign or even scar tissue from the few times I hit my head as a child (which is what I’ve thought all along). In which case my head stays intact and it stays in. No surgery of the absolute most invasive kind there can possibly be (of which I’ve had a fear of for pretty much ever, since I found out they very often keep you awake while they do it).
Needless to say, I cried in the stupid waiting room filled with old ladies who are 3 or 4 times my age and the receptionist had to pass me tissue while they arranged to bump up my MRI to an earlier date. The waiting room looked just like that scene in garden state where Zach Braff goes to a neurologist and there’s about a hundred documents and diplomas on the wood panelling (Its weird how much of my life has been haunted by Natalie Portman. When I was 14 and heard about the open casting call for the first Star Wars movie I wished there was a way to get to New York to audition because I knew I looked enough like Carrie Fisher to play her mother. Then it turned out I went to grade school with Hayden Christiansen, and then in high school sweet nerdy boys had crushes on me cause I looked like her).
The internet (which is more and more my most trusted ally) tells me that since the lesion is dense and ‘calcified’, and uniform in shape, that it is most likely not malignant and that the doctor was most definitely an overzealous idiot who is used to dealing with old ladies with dementia, not young ladies with brain damage… or… well… brain cancer.
My mother who is a administrative nurse with many connections talked to her friends and then reinforced my belief that the specialist was stupid, by telling me that I should really be seeing a neurosurgeon, at this point, not a neurologist. Because there’s something physical and visible inside my brain, and that’s a neurosurgeons speciality - finding it, identifying it and deciding if it needs to come out. Not just general afflictions of the brain.
Its very strange to realize that in the right (or actually very, very wrong) circumstances my sickly brain is a hot commodity that young overachieving doctors with something to prove would love to experiment on and crack into. I’ve found out the hard way that doctors are not like Zach Braff.
I have been going through this stuff for so long now finding out this new stuff doesn’t even effect me as much as it should, I think. That probably has something to do with the antidepressants I’m on. They are pleasantly numbing at times. Eventually you even get used to them and forget they’re there. I probably don’t actually need them, but I think they might be making things a little bit easier to handle. For the last year its been nothing but blood tests and doctors visits and vague explanations and assumptions that I should just go on antidepressants already by everyone from ignorant doctors to well meaning professors. Stupid people are everywhere. Quick fixes are too easy to come by. Imagine if 6 months ago my doctor put me on Wellbutrin and kicked me out the door? But I kept telling them I didn’t feel depressed. Didn’t fit the symptoms, the clinical definition. Thankfully my doctor listened. That has taught me that the patient is always right. You know your own body better than anyone else, and if your doctor won’t listen to you find anther doctor. I think that lesson will come in handy later on.
But. There is actually nothing I can do about this. A chunk of my brain is just gone, gone. Never to return, to heal, to function. To be chemically altered back to normal. Whatever happens, whatever ends up being wrong with me that’s what’s true. I am not a whole person. A very small but significant part of me is missing, and I think the only thing that makes me feel a little bit good about all this is that I can no longer be expected to be that whole person who can deal with the world around her. That part of my brain that makes the world easy to deal with is damaged. I may look fine. I may act normal. I’m not. I need help to make it any farther.