Bounty

I would have written sooner, but I've been having all these medical tests, don't you know. Neurologist, check. Ophthalmologist, check. Sleep deprived EEG, check. Still left: head x-ray and MRI. And guess what? So far, everything is checking out as normal — and consistent with (ta da!) migraines. Let the Internet be your doctor, say I. I mean, I don't say that to my actual doctor, although I may check in with her soon and find out if I really have to take the MRI, given that all the other tests have come back negative and I haven't had any bizarre neurological symptoms in weeks, now. Weeks! Like they never even happened.

Which is how I'm starting to feel about summer, now that I mention it. We are literally and figuratively packing away the last of the season, pulling on jeans and hoodies, pulling out the rest of the gardens, except for the cherry tomatoes, which we try to remember to cover up at night against the threat of frost. The night before my sleep-deprived EEG, I washed and halved and roasted 25 pounds of Roma tomatoes with onion and garlic and spices, a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of sea salt per pan (just like Rachel over at 6512 and Growing said), programming the oven to turn on at midnight so that I woke at 2 AM to the smell of caramelized garlic and tomato.

And I can tell you, there are worse ways to wake up, even at 2 AM. Even when you can't drink coffee.

I had planned about eight hours' worth of activities in the four hours I had to myself in the wee hours between waking and leaving for the hospital. (I used the word "hours" three times in the preceding sentence! I am amazing!) I had movies, and several seasons' worth of old TV shows (Mad Men and In Treatment; slightly skeptical of the latter: I'm not sure that watching other people's tortured, albeit fictional, therapy sessions qualified as the healthiest way to spend my bonus time). I journalled. I folded laundry. But mostly I made sauce, pulling the first batch of tomatoes from the oven and losing myself in their richness. I admit that I ate several of them right out of the pan, stopping only when I started to feel slightly queasy. Then I slid the second round of baking pans into the oven, and even managed to fit in a third round before walking to the hospital at sunrise , listening to This American Life on my iPod.

(I had planned to split that box of tomatoes between the sauce and some other stuff, but did you know that 25 pounds of Roma tomatoes cooks down to about seven containers? And so of course I had to go back to the vegetable guys who set up a makeshift market each year at the corner of High and Algoma, and pick up another case. Next up was bhaighan bhartha, an Indian eggplant curry that reduced my 11 (admittedly smallish) eggplants to a couple of duelling saucepans on the stove. Never even made it to the freezer. Next year, I buy a bushel.)

All in all, not a bad way to spend a few hours. And although I had been thinking that, really, sleep is overrated and I should just get up at 2 AM every day, because I would get so much done and the sleep-deprived postpartum psychosis wasn't really so bad after all, I nearly wept with relief when the technician told me that, "ideally," I would be asleep for the test. And then she stuck about 8000 wires to my head with rubber cement and covered me very gently with a blanket and I lay down on her gurney and crashed while she mapped (originally typed "napped" there; how Freudian) my brain for seizure activity. Of which I believe she found none. I'm thinking that if I ever have insomnia I'm going to find a gurney and some rubber cement and a scratchy wool blanket and I will be JUST FINE.

Already am.

If you know what's good for you

A couple weeks ago I kept smelling this burning smell. Burning like singed hair or like on that day in October where you finally cave and turn on the heat even though it's not November and you are constitutionally opposed to turning on the heat before November but you do anyway because damn it's cold, and then the house smells like burning dust for an hour? Which is kind of comforting? That kind of smell. Except that it wasn't comforting. It was disturbing, not so much because, well, you know — burning — but because nobody else in the house could smell it. Instead, they just gave me funny looks. At which point I, mainly out of spite, consulted the Internet, even though at this point that's basically a cliché, but I had a few minutes to kill, and of course the Internet told me that my choices were either a pituitary brain tumour or that I need use a neti pot more often. Check. Just as the burning smell died down, though, I lost peripheral vision in my right eye for a few hours. This happens to me about every eight months, where people's faces seemed to melt away as I talk to them or I try to read but the words on the right side of the page flicker and disappear. It's happened often enough that I'm used to it, but it did strike me as a little odd that it happened right on the heels of the burning thing.

And then, on the heels of that little episode, I came down with some weird kind of sinus headache, wherein my head felt as though it was filled with ball bearings encased in viscous, fiery fluid. And anytime I bent over, the ball bearings slammed across my brain's pain centre and into the side of my skull, and that was not so pleasant.

So, I finally went to the doctor. I had resisted going because partly I felt like a dork and partly because my doctor is not a particularly "wait-and-see" kind of person. Which is why I now have, in addition to antibiotics and nasal corticosteroids, referrals to a neurologist and an ophthalmologist, and appointments pending for an MRI, a head x-ray, and something called a sleep-deprived EEG, which I'm particularly excited about because it will force me to stay up till 3 AM without caffeine and I will finally get to catch up on all those episodes of Mad Men I've been meaning to watch.

And so, I am torn. All my slightly bizarre neurological symptoms are probably nothing. And yet, even the phrase "slightly bizarre neurological symptoms" should be enough to give me pause. Still, I have a feeling that I will go through all these expensive, vaguely inconvenient, diagnostic tests just to be given a clean bill of health. Perversely, it's enough to make me wish for — and yes, I know that I shouldn't say things like this — some kind of juicy diagnosis in order to justify costs of the tests (borne by the Canadian taxpayers, of which I am, happily, one). Which I realize is stupid. At the same time as I am immensely grateful to live in a country where I don't have to choose whether or not to take these tests based on how much they will cost.

And around and around I go. Am I being responsible by getting thoroughly checked out, or is the responsible thing to adopt a conservative, wait-and-see kind of approach? Is my doctor overreacting, or am I — conditioned by all those messages aimed at women not to take their own health too seriously — underreacting?  Are these merely academic questions, or am I focusing on this kind of philosophical frippery in order to avoid imagining the worst?

Don't answer that.

P.S. Okay, actually, feel free to answer that.

Dexter

I got a call from the school the other day.

(That’s a whole genre right there, isn’t it? Documents that begin, “I got a call from the school the other day”? That’s about as writing prompt-y as you can get, full of rich imaginings involving truancy and vomit and broken limbs and suspensions and lice. I mean, no one’s heart grows just a little bit lighter when they see the name of their child’s school on call display before picking up.)

Anyway, so I picked up (like I’m going to ignore a call from the school), and there was Rowan sounding very small and far away. “Mom?” He sounded as though he was at the bottom of a well. “Mom? My neck is bleeding.”

Awesome.

Turns out that a stick was thrown by an unknown child and caught him in the neck, giving him a nasty gash. His teacher came on the phone to say that while it looked ugly, it didn’t seem to be too serious. But that he didn’t want a Band-Aid on it. “Mm-hmm,” I said.

“So,” she said, “do you want to come get him, or do you want him to stay in school until the end of the day?”

Um, guess?

“Well,” I said, hedging my bets and weighing my deadline. “If he can manage to stay in school until the end of the day, that’s fine with me.” But I knew it wouldn’t fly even as I said the words: once the option of going home was introduced, the option of staying there fell to the bottom of that same well. I overheard the discussion in the background and then the teacher came on the phone again. “Okay,” I said, “I’m on my way.”

And I went, meeting him in the office where he sat, big-eyed and forlorn, on a bench, holding a piece of paper towel to his neck. When he saw me, his lower lip began to tremble. I got a look at the cut: jagged, slightly deep, about an inch long. Nothing pretty, but nothing too serious. Apparently, his teacher told me, he’d gone right back to class and hadn’t even noticed it until she pointed out.

He agreed after much convincing to put a Band-Aid over it for the walk home.

“You’re going to want to put some Polysporin on that,” a bigger kid, probably in fifth grade, said to me as I went to sign out Rowan.

“Great idea,” I said. Because I would never think to put Polysporin on my kid’s cut.

But he was just warming up. “It’s a really good thing that didn’t get him even 1 INCH over,” the fifth-grader continued.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been good if it had hit his face.”

“His face?” the kid said. “I’m talking about his CAROTID ARTERY. If he had cut open his CAROTID ARTERY, he would have been dead in like six seconds flat. Blood everywhere!”

Rowan stood next to me, his eyes growing bigger and bigger. I pulled him closer to me.

“Yup, that CAROTID ARTERY is a killer,” the kid continued. What, are you 70? I wanted to ask. Instead I smiled and thanked him and gathered up my lucky-to-be-alive son. Who skipped the whole way home, and then, when Rachel came home with a movie for him, ran to the door to meet her him practically shrieked with glee, “Guess what! If a stick had hit my CAROTID ARTERY, I would’ve DIED!”