I Shall Call Him Squishy

I was living in a crappy apartment at the time, smoking too much and playing World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online game that was known for soul sucking. My life seemed to revolve around World of Warcraft. It was like a hobby that had spiraled dangerously close to out of control and surpassed reading and writing, which had been my safe haven from the world since I was a kid, Playstation games, which I selected with the snobbishness most reserved for books playing only those that I deemed worthy of my attention, and even eating and sleeping. I would sit in my room avoiding my roommates playing WoW until six or seven in the morning when I would drag myself up with whatever book I was reading at the time and lumber heartlessly down to the vegetarian restaurant that was unanimously agreed had the best breakfast in town. Hunched over a bowl of grits I’d pretend to read my book then go to work where I edited heartless responses to phone survey questions to be drawn into a report for a client I was convinced wouldn’t read our work. At five I’d return home for a three hour nap and start my day over. If I had a rough day I’d skip sleeping all together. I seemed to thrive on lack of sleep and, often times, lack of eating. There were times when I would think my life sad but, for the most part, I was disturbingly satisfied with my position and thought myself happy.

 

Finally I decided it was time to stop smoking. Cigarettes were a waste of money and I convinced myself that if I quit I would magically become more attractive and the days would double in length so I could not only fit in the copious amounts of WoW I was playing but also get out and do something, maybe have time for a boyfriend. With this new found time my friends would also be less bogged down with school work and their lives and we could spend more time together. Yes, quitting smoking would be the solution to all my problems. And so I told myself that the pack I was opening would be my last.

 

I was sitting in my apartment around midnight on my laptop when it started. The fingers on my right hand began wimping out. It was a strange feeling, and characterized by an inability to type properly. It was like my fingers had a mind of their own and found whatever keys they wanted. Then my whole hand began tingling. Like any normal person I smacked the hand and tried to shake it out but the sensation of falling asleep continued. I excused myself from my friends and proceeded to go run cold water over my still tingly hand. I felt the cold but it was as if it was someone else’s hand. I dismissed it and returned to my computer. When the feeling spread into my arm and the side of my face I pulled aside one of my online friends, a retired paramedic and told her what was going on. She was quite alarmed and urged me to go to the hospital. I called my mother, who expressed annoyance at being bothered around midnight with my hypochondria. She told me to call the hospital and ask them if I should come in, probably hoping that the feeling would either pass or some well meaning doctor would tell me to eat something and go to sleep. The receptionist at the hospital told me she couldn’t dispense medical advice over the phone but I should definitely go to the emergency room. My mother was extremely annoyed but came to get me anyway. By the time she arrived to pick me up the tingly had passed and gave way to my right eye being unable to focus and a general hazy, confused feeling that was even more alarming then the tingling.

 

When I was six my mother and I lived on top of a mountain called Catawba. We had a small white house that had no running water, little electricity, and a creepy old barn in the yard I wasn’t supposed to play in. It was an out of the way little house at the end of a mile long driveway that stretched straight up the side of the mountain. For second grade my grandfather moved us into town so that my mother could easily attend college and into an equally small white house situated on the only entrance into a popular college party neighborhood and next door to a renowned crack house. During the time we lived there the crack house (which was ultimately only busted for meth) deteriorated rapidly under the watchful eye of our psycho neighbor Clyde. For whatever reason my mother struck up an uneasy friendship with Clyde and his revolving door of bizarre tenants, I’m sure she considered it neighborly while I would pretend not to notice when I came home to find Clyde hunched in our driveway picking up rotten pears. When I moved out so did my mother and both of us had washed our hands of the house on Harrell Street and its strange occurrences.

 

When we reached the emergency room my confused had escaladed to the point where I was capable of little more then staring off into space and startling at most noises. Which would explain why I barely noticed when a raving man was wheeled close to me with a friend in tow who was desperately trying to convince his buddy to let the doctors take a look at him. The man in the wheelchair was quite old and bleeding profusely from a large hole on his head along with a myriad of other scratches across his face, neck, and hands. He held a veterans card and was bickering with anyone who tried to talk to him about not needing help and other things I barely heard.

 

My mother, on the other hand, recognized him immediately.

 

I was content to continue hugging myself and ignoring everyone which left my mother free to converse with the raving man, our old neighbor Clyde. As it turned out he had been helping move furniture out of the barn out of our old house on Catawba Mountain, fallen, caught himself on a rusty nail and everything else in his path, and lay unconscious on the ground for several minutes. And yet wanted nothing to do with the hospital. Through means that I didn’t understand my mother calmed Clyde down and convinced him to allow a doctor to look at his wounds and give him a tetanus shot. And so the four of us were moved into the inner sanctum of the hospital to await doctors not two doors down from each other. I continued to sit and answer nurses’ and doctors’ questions in a distracted manner while my mother tried to comfort me but was continually pulled away to tell Clyde that he was, in fact, NOT allowed to yell at or hit the nurses. Clearly he needed full time babysitting and I barely needed to know where I was.

 

After a series of tests came back negative and the doctors were baffled at what caused my condition the request of a CAT scan was brought to me. “Just a precaution,” they said, “we just want to know that your brain is ok.” I did not want the test but made my case quietly, asking if it was really necessary and how much of a chance there was that it would find anything. It was almost certain that the test would find nothing but they still really wanted to do it. Meanwhile, in Clyde’s room, a doctor was demanding the same CAT scan of him due to his being unconscious and the very real chance that he had brain damage. Clyde wanted the test even less then I did. And he was much less reasonable about it, calling my mother away for stretches of five to ten minutes with his loud and unreasonable protests. Everyone involved agreed that Clyde had to have the test, except, of course, Clyde.

 

“Tell Clyde,” I told my mother, “I’m having a CAT scan and he’s not only making an idiot of himself but getting upstaged by a teenager.” That shut Clyde up. He had the test. And so did I.

 

Clyde’s test came back showing that he was merely a raving loon, not brain damaged, and he was immediately discharged.

 

My test results were not so lucky.

 

There was a sick irony that settled over me as the nice young neurologist tried to explain to me what my CAT scan had shown. Bone was white, fluid was black, brain was light grey, and I had a small spot of dark grey. That was all they saw. No one could tell me what that dark grey spot actually was. The neurologist wanted to hold me over night for observation and then get an MRI in the morning which would show them more and make for certain that I didn’t have a brain aneurysm like the one that had killed my father’s mother when she was only 30.

 

Reluctant and exhausted I agreed.

 

My mother went home for the night making the nurses promise that she would be called before I had my MRI in the morning. I slept in the emergency room bed hooked up to a heart machine which I was regularly woken up to readjust when I knocked loose one of the pads with my incessant lying on my back not moving.

 

In the morning I was rolled half asleep into the MRI machine. Which is one of the most miserable experiences of my entire life. They lay me down on my back, put pillow slats on either side of my head so I couldn’t move, set a Silence of the Lambs-eske barred mask over my face, and pushed me into a large, very thin machine that made loud whirs and clacked, made my stomach leap out of place, and was very reminiscent of being buried alive. And every thirty seconds or so this disembodied voice would say “Just stay still, you’re doing fine” or “Stop moving or we won’t be able to get a clear picture” or, the dreaded, “Just ten more minutes”. I lost it. They pulled me out of the machine and took me back to my room where I sat and cried. So they drugged me up.

 

I took the pills without thinking and sat in my room while they kicked in rethinking my position and convincing myself that I needed to get the hell out of there. I was putting my book in my purse when I passed out and woke up inside the coffin. It was exactly like the first time only now I had the added pleasure of being groggy and confused. “Well” I told myself “I’m here, no point in not letting it finish”. And I desperately distracted myself by running a World of Warcraft dungeon through my head, concentrating on every erroneous detail that I could remember trying not to move, scream, or throw up. Somehow I made it.

 

A well meaning male nurse wheeled me back to my room and brought me a soda while I stared around dazed, drugged, confused, and on the verge of crying. I sat for a good half an hour before the nurse came back and told me that the neurologist was on the phone and wanted to talk to me.

 

I was bed ragged, had not even looked at my hair, and bare foot as I padded down the emergency room hall too the nurse’s station to take my phone call.

 

I don’t remember most of what she said. Something about how it wasn’t something I wanted to hear or that it would be hard to hear and then she said the words that haunted me. “Rebecca,” She said slowly, “You have a brain tumor.” Everything else was a blur. She set up a follow-up appointment and somehow I made it back to my room where I stared at the wall some more, called my mother to pick me up, and signed my release papers.

 

There was a bench outside the emergency room where I sat to wait for my mother and rapidly smoked my last two cigarettes from the last pack. I tried to reason with this new fact but my brain felt fuzzy. I got into my mother’s car and she launched into a tirade about how dare they not call her to tell her I was going into the MRI. Something about how if they’d found a brain aneurism they would have rushed me straight into surgery and she wanted to be there.

 

So I started crying. The silent, walking dead thing I’d been working the last twelve hours dissolved in a wash of tears as my mother sat gaping at this bizarre show of emotions that was so unlike me. When I told her what had happened she hugged me, I didn’t want to be touched and the sensation felt cheap and dirty but pushing her off or saying anything was just too cruel and too much effort.

 

After I was done crying my mother took me out for waffles and a milkshake. I also bought a pack of cigarettes because there seemed no point in quitting something that brought me even a little bit of joy at this point. I often told people that I tried to quit smoking then I ended up in the hospital. That tends to shut them up. Few people will argue the whole lung cancer issue when you have that kind of argument.

 

Months later when I had come to terms with my friendly neighborhood tumor that no doctor could tell me anything about except “It doesn’t seem to be growing” and the semi constant drugged MRI trips my mother gave me a pensive look and asked “Have you considered that your brain tumor might be caused by your cell phone?”

 

I tried not to look at her like she’d lost her mind and said, logically and politely, “Have you considered my brain tumor might be from smoking?”

 

“Oh Rebecca,” She laughed, “That’s ridiculous.”

Non-Fiction.
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