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.

May 10, 2016

One day, I think, one day I’ll learn to ditch optimism at the door of the hospital.

It’s warm inside, full of sun-struck open corridors, Starbucks and welcome desks, still-faced paper-white patients in wheelchairs and walkers, smiling patients in hospital gowns chatting in familiar tones with receptionists, and couples where one of them sports a cannula in the back of their hand like a grim, slipped corsage. Glowing pregnant women roll around the wings like scattered pearls, lit differently to all of us visiting with our own personal decay.

The recent neurology appointment was so reassuring that I can actually read while we’re waiting. The neurosurgeon calls us in to say, Yes, hello, but have you thought about brain surgery? Because that cerebral anomaly is leaking, always, always, he says, and if it blows for good, the result could be - probably would be - catastrophic. And since it’s located in the area of speech, I’d not only be paralysed down my right side, but my ability to find words would be severely impaired, possibly forever.

I think, Seriously? My words? Are you kidding me? It couldn’t have been in my juggling lobes? I couldn’t be putting my Donkey Kong skills at risk? We ask more questions. I try to ignore the creeping sense of icy death spreading from the base of my spine, down my thighs, up my chest. I know I’ll fall asleep as soon as we get into the car; my usual shelter from the storm. The surgeon scoffs as we ask about mortality risks in the operation, which I suppose is the correct response, and we shake his hand and walk around the hospital and decide the best thing is probably to let him incise my skin, remove a section of my skull, and excise this stowaway from the delicate folds and walkways of my brain. I am so glad I am here with my favourite person in the whole world, even in this situation, even with this decision. I wonder what we’d do if I had a major personality change after the operation, as can sometimes happen, according to my vague recollections of fact-less Daily Mail articles. To be fair, my other half says, it’s 50/50 that you might actually end up with a better personality afterwards.

I fall asleep as soon as we get into the car.

In the evening, I speak to my neurologist brother-in-law on the other side of the world, who reassures me that I desperately need a second opinion, that I shouldn’t go flinging myself under a brain surgeon’s knife without a little more information. My sister knows how impatient I am to have difficult situations done and dusted, and understands that I would have had the surgery this afternoon if it had been an option.

I would have been calling you right now from my hospital bed, I say.

Yes, but using only your left hand, she says, both of us gurgling with laughter.

With my new vocabulary of twenty words, I add.

Oh my god, she says, I’d finally be able to best you in an argument! I’m beginning to think this operation has no downsides.

March 7, 2016

February 24, 2016

The more concerned everyone is for me, the worse I feel, like I’m just about keeping my own sloshing supply of panic under control but every time someone offers me a top-up it threatens to spill out and flood us all away. This morning, J and I take the kids to school together, and I find myself humming the alternate version of the alphabet that I was taught at 9 years old by the teacher who did our school plays, that we were encouraged to sing when we felt anxious and mouth-dry in the moments before we stepped onstage. Stuff learnt early beds in deep.

At the hospital, there is a similar delay to my last visit, but this time I have someone with me, and we both are laughing, and when we’re finally called in, I feel almost like a normal person might feel in this situation.

The neurologist seems different this time, although maybe it’s just the bright blue sky behind him; the golden-blue light of the promise of better days, I think afterwards, in hyperbolic giddiness. I work through my list of questions, each answer surprising us: not that serious, low risk, long term danger minimal, until we’re just pummelling him But are sure and But what about and But how can you tell, on and on until we have to admit a beautiful defeat, and I want to cry even though I don’t seem to be able to do that anymore, goddammit.

Afterwards, I go for a run in the cold bright day and a flock of birds turns above my head, a whole lace curtain of tattered, feathered underbelly sweeping over me, welcoming in a New Era with such cartoonish positivity that as I run, along the river, along with the sun, my upbeat new playlist in my ears, I would cry again now, if I did cry, which I still don’t, for the sheer joy of good health and good family and good hope.

And my brain says: That’s all well and good, until we see the neurosurgeon and hear whether you’ve got to have your skull opened up.

And I say: Who do you think you’re kidding? You had me fooled for a minute, but the verdict’s in: you’re on my team now, buddy.

November 12, 2015

My consultant seems angry with me — a cancelled appointment that I’d considered duplicated but he thought I’d missed; neither of us had understood the significance of results he hadn’t seen — and it takes me a while to understand what this anger’s for, right up until he softens and says, ‘I only saw your MRI this morning, and we found something.’ He beckons me around his desk and pauses, then asks, ‘What’s your background?’ and I snort, either in my head or out loud, and say, ‘Not neurology?’ and he smiles at me like I’d been trying to make him laugh, and frrrrrrrps with his mouse through the slices of my brain on the MRI before a cluster of darkness comes up, spreading through several layers, and I walk back around the desk before I fall down, and think, How is no one here with me?

He talks slowly and calmly, and I hate him; it’s an argument I’ve had in relationships that this tone isn’t calming, it’s controlling, and I don’t need control, I need empathy and information. But he says we’re in no rush, it’s not an emergency: it’s blood vessels that have probably been that way my whole life, and they irritated a nerve and caused my summer seizure. He hesitates to use the word ‘stroke’ in our conversation, but I make him say it.

I try to think of the questions I asked in Cancer Dad’s appointments, try to think of the information the people who I should have insisted be at this appointment with me would want to know. He mentions surgery, and uses the phrase ‘cutting it out’, which, frankly, when I’d prepared for a three-minute meeting where they’d just gently chastise me for even wasting their time by showing up, is not something I’d really anticipated. I forgive him, though, because he answers my same questions three or four times when, rather than listening, I keep looking out of the window and letting my thoughts bang against the opposite brick wing of the hospital.

When I get back home my mother is there, playing with the baby, and she and I try to hammer this diagnosis into some kind of acceptable development. I tell her that I’m jealous of Cancer Dad for getting all the way to see his children grown up, happy, settled, with children of their own. How lucky he was. She reminds me of a summer cocktail party on their RAF base that he’d taken her to when she was pregnant with my eldest sister; how by Christmas he was the only man from that party still alive. He had plenty of tastes of early mortality, thanks very much.

Shortly afterwards, the neurologist in the family gives me a call, all the way from Australia, and uses my favourite tone: no-nonsense, factual, conversational. He describes the blood vessel cluster as simply a kind of birthmark, and when my sister hisses in the background ‘a birthmark that could kill you’, I’m utterly reassured, knowing that she can read his body language and see the joke is OK.

When she hears that one potential treatment is glueing the grape-cluster of vessels, my sister offers to post me a glue gun for Christmas. I’ll just have to trust my brain to behave in the meantime.

The cardiology consultant asks the nurse to give me another ECG, so I lie on the bed and let them stick wired patches on me, from ankle to breastbone. Afterwards, he explains that any heart irregularity I have is within normal parameters, but — he scratches his belly, gutsily bursting out between a popped button just above his belt — do I have a fear of MRIs? Only his lack of English would make him ask me so honestly, so simply. I shrug. I’ll have one if I have to; I didn’t enjoy the last one, though. He watches me for a moment, his head tipped back and to the side, then abruptly, he says, No, we’ll do something else instead. I won’t make you go through that again if we don’t have to.

He checks me over, and I feel him jolt, discovering something. What is this? he says, holding up my wrist. It’s paint, I laugh, and point to my toes, my face, my other forearm.

Ok, he says. You’re fine.

II.

One of the kids says to me as I tuck them up, How was your hospital appointment? A whole thick book flicks from front to back while I take a breath: how beautiful they are; how thoughtful; how separate; how our bodies are all disintegrating; how stories about accidents and illness fur up the arteries in my brain for days; how every momentary faintness, every headache, every forgotten word or prickling finger is a black cloud, waiting to burst; how I could never, ever leave them; how I’d ask for nothing other than to see them grow up, healthy and happy and good; how painful it is to love them, bruising and sharp and suffocating; how I want to pour my love in their ear, rich and treaclish and golden, and have it sustain them whenever they’re in need; how I wish when they’re short on good dreams — sometimes they can’t sleep because, they tell me, they can’t find any good dreams — I could light up the inside of their eyes with how I see them, funny and smart and kind and brilliant, so they would glow in their beds; how I wish I could show them, too, all my mistakes, on a gleaming white projector screen, so they can learn at 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 what it took me cold, aching, marble-lined decades to discover; how jealous I am that I already know Cancer Dad got to see his children grown and well.

Fine, I say, Thank you; it was fine.

October 1, 2015

July 30, 2015

Only when I’m leaving the house, foot on the bike pedal, kissing the children before pushing down the front step and out onto the road, do I realise how little I want to do this on my own. My seizure was four weeks ago, and besides that midnight ambulance ride to the creeping, bleeping, whispering hospital - in the fresh morning light in our hospital room I say to J, “The night is dark and full of terrors,” and we laugh, like that can capture waking up to paramedics in my bedroom, or the drunk man threatening police along the hospital corridor, or my minutes-long vegetative state - I’ve felt fine, never better. But cycling away from the house, the children calling I LOVE YOOOUUU through the letterbox as they smell my fear, I am frightened. I focus on pedalling; cycling was a good idea, even if I can’t lift my eyes more than two metres in front of me, my heavy heart, my heavy head, my heavy eyes.

At the hospital I cycle round and round looking for the bike stands, marvelling at the bloody-minded dark humour of these places: the unavoidable decay, the unstoppable entropy, the inevitable death. Toppled laundry racks, broken beds, rusting tanks.

At the MRI unit, someone shows me where I can lock my stuff up. When she comes back in for me, I’ve somehow looped my bra strap twice round one arm with the other one wedged into my jumper sleeve, elbow-first. She says, “Apparently you can leave your bra on.” Inside the scanning room, the radiographer tells me how, even as a fan of the franchise, he nearly walked out of Terminator Genysis when they not only turned an MRI scanner off and on again (impossible, he explains, that’s weeks of refilling the helium), but also *up*. I laugh. He looks at my trainers as I lie down and says, Runner? And I say yes, because why the hell not. At the top of my head cage, there’s an angled mirror showing my feet, and the desk where the radiographer sits. I don’t understand why they give that mirror until I’m fully in the machine, and the roof and walls are inches from my face, and all I can think is Look in the mirror and breathe, just breathe, look in the mirror and breathe, and I can’t even fall asleep because if I close my eyes it feels most like being buried alive. At one point I see him take off his glasses to more closely examine something on screen - is he surprised by something? - and I wonder if I’m sick in here would they be able to get me out before I choked on it.

Tssssss tkk tkk tkk tkk unggghhhhhhhhhhhh it goes, for twenty minutes, while I try to stop swallowing and breathing and thinking and feeling. The body temperature air being blown over my face, and the hard plastic vibrations, and my chewed-on fear: all of these make me feel like I’m back on a long-haul plane. Then it’s done, and I’m out, and if I’m talking too loud it’s only because the device is so damn deafening, despite the ear plugs and pads he gave me. I cycle home. We eat Snickers ice creams in the garden and plan tomorrow.