The Calm Before the Swell
Etta and Clark, my 5 1/2-year-old-twins at the top of a big snow mountain. January 18, 2021.
For the next two weeks I kept telling myself the bloodwork was fine. Those I had told would speculate with me, most of us deciding I had some weird immune disorder.
It would make sense, my whole system has always been a little messed up anyway. I have a peanut allergy and have had it since 1986. I was the only kid in the school or at the party with a peanut allergy, way before it was cool (it is cool, right?) and I am happy to accept the crown on behalf of peanut allergy kids everywhere as the first one. My allergy in itself is an immune response, my immune system tells my brain the food is trying to kill me and my brain turns my body bright red and slowly closes my breathing hole (I’m sure that’s the technical term).
I’ve also had asthma since I was three. I was a pretty hyper kid and my mom would have to stop me several times a day to hook me up to a machine to sit and breathe. As I got older, I could use the fancy tube thing in tandem with the inhaler. I’ll never forget this one birthday, I think I was in grade three, that I had an asthma attack at my own pool party and my dad had to take me home. I remember making a cave with my hands and breathing into it. I think I recovered enough to meet the other kids back at my house and have cake, but maybe I’m just telling myself that happened. I’m still cool, right? All this is awesome.
In more weird defect news, at the end of 2019 I had a massive headache. Which for me, is a big deal, because I have always had massive headaches. Migraines. Tension headaches. Sunstroke headaches. Ate too much candy headaches. You name the headache, I’ve had it. So, as a person who generally doesn’t complain to their doctor, when I showed up and said I had the worst headache of my life, she sent me to the hospital. There, while waiting for a lumbar puncture to find out for sure that I didn’t have aneurysm, imagine my surprise when the doctor came in and told me I can’t have a lumbar puncture because I have a brain malformation. An Arnold Chiari Brain Malformation Type 1 to be exact. The doctor looks at me and my husband and says “did you know you had that?” And I said “no.” Because let’s be real, how often do we get a CT scan of our brain. Never. The answer is never Mr. Doctor Man. Also, it turns out I’m extra lucky because I did have an epidural with the twins (to quote my OB “your canal is made for a baby to come out but not for someone’s arm to go all the way in and pull Twin B out and sometimes that has to happen”); all those forms you sign saying you can be paralyzed from the epidural, well, now that I know my brain tonsils sit slightly outside of my spine, I’m pretty lucky that didn’t happen to me.
Anyway, back to LumpyGate. At this point we decided:
A) it was some weird immune disorder I would have to live with for the rest of my life or
B) it’s a benign tumour — since my bloodwork was so good.
I said a few times in those weeks “at this point, I hope it’s a benign tumour. They can go in, take it out and we’ll feed it to a fucking turtle”. If you don’t understand this reference, run, don’t walk, to your local bookseller and pick up a copy of Calypso by David Sedaris. It does not disappoint. Alternatively, you can just open a new window, purchase and it will be delivered to your house.
At the encouragement of my husband I started going for walks. It seemed to help the painful aches and swelling even though the actual act of walking made me want to lie down in the street and sob. I started trying to get 3,000 steps at least a day. I was racking up 7 and 8,000 steps somedays. The twins and I started going on hikes and despite how tough it felt to push through, the days I walked were better than the days I rested.
Our favourite pastime became walking to a local parking lot with giant snow mountains. I’d get a walk in and exercise by pushing them in the stroller (all 80lbs of them) and they got to play for hours in mystery caves. I would pike their Strider bikes on top of the stroller (and try not to drop them) on the walk there. They would bring their spades from home and dig and dig happily. I would lap the empty parking lot, listening to podcasts and their laughter. Again, despite the wanting to lie down on the yellow lines and not move, it was a nice way to pass the afternoons.
So this is how we continued for the rest of January. In this weird bliss of knowing the lump wasn’t a tumour combined with the aches and pains and subtle swelling I was experiencing that told me clearly something was up. After what felt like 1,800 days, the hospital finally called with an appointment for the biopsy on Lumpy. I would have to wait until Wednesday, February 17. By this point it was almost February so we figured “what’s two more weeks?”