I sleep in the car, my nerves sedating me as usual. We drive past the American Cemetery on the way to the hospital – apparently – and when I wake up as we park in the multi-storey my husband says, I’ve always wanted to visit there. I was going to stop on the way but I thought if you woke up you would panic that you’d woken up in Heaven.
A new doctor, an actual brain surgeon this time, rather than a consultant who invites you to consider his proposed brain operation with the words, ‘I’m not a brain surgeon, but I will perform the operation on your brain.’ This latest consultant has a colleague in the room for my appointment who looks like a young Mary Beard, and I am already fond of both of them. The brain surgeon has the air of someone who wears ties with miniature hippos on, like all brain surgeons should. He tells us: If I could be autocratic, if 100 people had your situation, I would send all 100 of them home and tell them to get on with living their lives. He looks momentarily wistful at the thought of clearing his desk so fast. But! we say, and repeat the words from the last appointment: catastrophic risk and life-changing and major trauma and constant bleeding. In a soft voice he says, Yes, you might, possibly, have a major bleed one day, that could affect the speech lobe in which this problem is located, but who knows? It might actually improve your writing.
As if I didn’t love him enough.
As we leave into the white sunshine, eating ice creams, giddy, high-spirited at the thought that maybe my death might just be like everyone else’s, unforeseen, unknowable, hopefully distant, and nothing we have choice in, I say to J, I think that other consultant just really wanted to do my operation. Maybe one more brain operation and he gets the cerebrum badge to stitch onto his white coat.