Spinal Shock
“Stop, stop,” I said.
Dr. Shure had been reading the full, lengthy report out loud. After she said the word “tumor,” I stopped listening.
“I need to know right now if it’s . . . if it’s cancer.”
Rich gripped my hand. Dr. Shure looked back at the report and spoke slowly. “I am ninety percent certain that it is not cancer.”
We both let out a relieved breath.
“But it needs to come out right now.”
“Is it big?” I asked.
Dr. Shure looked first at Rich, then at me. “It’s big.”
•
“I’m driving you home.”
We were standing outside the medical building. I felt light and strange, as if my body hadn’t caught up to the news yet.
“It’s okay,” I told Rich.
“I don’t want you driving alone.”
“I have to call my parents.”
“We’ll call them when we get home.”
“I think I just want to drive home by myself. I’m okay. I really am.” I really was. Rich stared at me for a long time. Our heads were pulsing with the same four-beat phrase: What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? He came to a decision—my decision—to let me drive home on my own.
“Please don’t call anyone from the car.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Take the subway to the office, get my car, and meet you at home.”
“But I can drive you!”
He shook his head. “I love you.”
It was lunchtime. The street was busy. We were standing in the middle of the sidewalk. People had to keep scooting around us. It was so hot, so humid, but when he put his arms around me we were both bone dry. My arms were stippled with goose bumps.
“Oh my God, Rich.”
“I know.”
I drove home in complete silence—no radio, no air-conditioning, no open window. My hands clenched the steering wheel. I was sitting so straight my back didn’t touch the seat. The only good news was that the kids were still at camp for another two weeks. That bought us time to figure out what to tell them.
I was home in less than ten minutes. I whispered to myself: Now I’m in the driveway, now I’ll get out of the car, now I’ll walk up the porch stairs, now I’ll unlock the front door. Once inside, I took a walking tour of the main floor as if I were a real estate agent showing my clients the same rooms over and over again. I paced until Rich arrived, just a few minutes later.
“Did you call your parents yet?”
“I was waiting for you.”
I picked up the phone, dialed, and walked around the dining room table, unable to keep still. My mother picked up on the first ring.
“Ruthie?”
“Yes.”
I heard her yell, “LARRY, PICK UP THE PHONE! IT’S RUTHIE!”
“Hello, dear.” My father. His voice was calm but I could feel both my parents’ frenetic, panicked energy coursing through the line.
“What is it? Tell me,” my mother said.
“It’s okay.” I laughed. “Really, it’s okay. I have a tumor.”
That was not at all how I meant to tell them. I covered my mouth, worried I might throw up, but I played it real cool, like I was talking a robber into giving me his gun. But my parents had been in the parenting game too long to be fooled by my tone, and I realized, in that moment, that I had never been a good actress—just a lucky one.
“Ruthie, you are going to be fine. Do you hear me?” My mother spoke sternly, as if she were mad at me.
“I know.”
“Is Rich there?”
“Right beside me.”
“Good. Have you called Joel yet?”
My cousin. One of the heads of orthopedic surgery at a major Toronto hospital.
“Not yet.”
“Call him right now and call us back. You’re going to be fine!” I heard the crack in her voice before she hung up without saying good-bye. I took note: This is what good parents do—cry behind the curtain, never onstage.
“You don’t need to read me the entire report,” Joel said, cutting to the chase in the way he has done since we were kids. “Just tell me where on your spine it is.”
“T3 to T5,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “it’s big but it’s not that big.”
What the hell did that mean? I didn’t understand any of it. I had never heard of a spinal meningioma, the technical name of my tumor. The T was for thoracic spine—my first MRI several months earlier had skipped that region. The focus then had been on two key spots: my lumbar spine and my brain, the only places where MS lived, the only houses we were looking for. But the MRI in Buffalo widened the scope, scanning my thoracic and cervical spine. The culprit had been hiding right between my shoulder blades.
“Are you sure it’s not cancer?” I asked Joel.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
Dr. Shure was right. Only in the rarest of cases were meningiomas cancerous.
“Okayallrightokay.”
I paced the kitchen floor faster now, keeping careful watch of my feet. If Joel wasn’t too worried, I told myself, then I didn’t need to be too worried. But then he repeated himself, almost as if he thought I couldn’t hear him: “Big, but not that big.”
I felt a kind of frenzied excitement, my body somehow registering my diagnosis as good news, as if something wonderful had just been revealed to me, as if my world were about to change, as if the next stage of my life was beginning right now.
All of this was true; none of it was wonderful.
Within hours, my cousin had phoned and made arrangements for me to meet the following week with his good friend, Dr. Ginsberg, who also happened to be the top neurosurgeon in the city—an amazing stroke of luck since new referrals had to wait six months to see him. But it still meant spending at least the next several days intimately connected to a terrible and insidious—possibly life-changing—tumor on my back. I felt it without actually feeling it every moment of the day. There was no question that it was sneaky—my back didn’t even hurt. I pictured it tucked inside my spine, a miniature Quasimodo, pulling on a little string here to make my feet trip, another string there to cause my thighs to freeze, and then tugging on this last, most delicate string, connected to my most private parts, stopping them from feeling anything at all. I had never been so close to something so spiteful.
I wrote cheerful letters to the kids, telling them how busy I had been at work, name-checking my most recent commercial bookings, the visits I’d had with their Bubba and Aunt Fanny, the lunches with my friends, the Miami ribs we were planning on having for their welcome-home dinner in less than two weeks’ time. I didn’t tell them that I called Rich at work constantly so he could tamp down my—our—growing anxiety, or that every afternoon, to get rid of the day faster, I would close the living room curtains and binge-watch sitcoms while laughing at none of them.
At night, my thoughts clacked like a typewriter, writing and rewriting all the facts that had led me to this point. I called Marc, an old friend who was also a doctor, to help me further decipher my MRI results. Dr. Shure had given me a copy, which I read and reread a thousand times, circling some words, underlining others, scribbling question marks everywhere, looking for clues to my outcome. I was falling into a rabbit hole that I hoped Marc could pull me out of.
“Ruthie,” he said, when I called him after midnight one night, “neuralgia is often an impossible thing to get to the bottom of. People get it for no reason and then have to spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to deal with it. You’re so lucky to have a definitive diagnosis, and when the surgery is over, you’re going to feel just great!”
“You mean everything will go back to normal?” I asked him, trying to nudge my luck more deeply into the good zone. Marc traded in exclamation marks, sprinkling them liberally, like salt, making every bit of bad news taste better.
“Marc?”
In the hesitation that followed, I imagined a world of upbeat possibilities: you’ll feel better than before, you’ll run faster, dance better, grow taller, look thinner.
“Everything will go back to normal, right?”
“You’ll feel great,” he said. His voice had fallen flat.
I had called him to get the response I wanted, not the one I feared. He, like everyone else, simply could not forecast how my story would end. I was pushing my luck right into a brick wall.
•
I didn’t cry—not when I got my diagnosis, not in the days that followed, not before I went to sleep. On a beautiful Wednesday night, the night before my first appointment with Dr. Ginsberg, Rich and I got a seat on a patio in a busy restaurant not far from our house.
“Fuck it,” I said, as soon as we sat down. “I’m having a martini.”
Rich ordered a beer. There were plenty of pretty people to look at, lots of families strolling with their kids on the sidewalk, ice creams dripping down chubby little hands. The night was warm and breezy. Our drinks came and we clinked glasses but hesitated before making a toast. I looked at Rich. He put his bottle down without saying a word, without taking a sip. His breathing had changed. Rich loves to brag that he never cries.
“Not even when you were little?” I had asked many times. “Not even when you were a baby?”
“Only once. When I was five.”
“Oh no! What happened?”
He always shrugs at this point. “I fell down.”
His face was crumpling, and then so was mine. I was out of my chair in a flash. I came up behind him and put my arms around his neck.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, over and over. We nodded our heads together. Our drinks sat on the table, sweaty and warm, untouched. We paid the bill and left.
•
Rich and I were sitting so close together in the doctor’s tiny office at St. Mike’s hospital, that I was practically in his lap. “Exactly how long have I been schlepping this tumor around?” I asked Dr. Ginsberg at our appointment, trying to turn my tumor into a joke.
“It appears to be a slow-growing one,” he said. “I’d say . . .”
He stopped, considered my feet again. I had just repeated some of the same exercises I had done in Dr. Shure’s office. One of them, walking with my feet tightly placed in front of each other, something I’d been able to do just weeks before, was now impossible. Once I had my feet in place, I was stuck. I couldn’t move backward or forward. It was as if I were sandwiched between two walls.
“I’ll be one moment,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “I want to take another look at your MRI.”
I watched him walk out of his office, jealous of the way his pigeon-toed feet moved so easily across the floor. When he returned, he sat down and rested his hands on his knees. “Judging from its size, I’d say your tumor has been growing for about ten years.”
“Ten years? How did I not know this?” I asked him. “Not feel it?”
“Because it wasn’t interfering with any of your body’s functions—until now. In fact, most meningiomas are never discovered. People die without ever having been bothered by their presence.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
He smiled before answering. Dr. Ginsberg was bow-legged with reddish hair, a small bearded chin, and kind eyes.
“I’m forty-five.”
“May I see your hands, please?”
He held them out in front of me and I watched them long enough to see that, even under close scrutiny, they didn’t shake.
“How long have you been a neurosurgeon?”
“Nine years. Ruth, I need to explain to you the risks of this surgery.”
Rich and I were holding hands so tightly it was starting to hurt, but neither of us dared let go.
“They are paralysis, death, incomplete tumor resection, spinal cord injury, CSF leak, infection, anesthetic related complications . . .”
I didn’t hear anything after he said the words paralysis and death.
“I want this thing off my back,” I said.
“I know.”
“When can you do it?”
I braced myself for how long I would have to wait. I was thinking about my kids, who were coming home from camp in just two days; about the shopping I would have to do to get them ready for the school year; about Joey beginning his first year of high school and how I wanted him to transition out of wearing sweatpants every day to wearing skinny jeans to suit his long and lean frame. I was thinking about how Degrassi would be resuming production in the next couple of weeks, which meant I would need to slip back into the role of my TV daughter’s strong, Christian mother, a mother who didn’t have a tumor on her back.
“I can do it on Tuesday,” he said. “Four days from now. Is that soon enough?”
I could have cried from both relief and terror and, when we left his office, that’s exactly what I did.
•
When I was in my mid-thirties, I had everything I had ever wanted: a man I loved, two little boys, a regular role in a television series, and a monthly column in a fashion magazine. But God help me if I walked past my room and saw a pile of unfolded laundry on the bed. My heart would race. Panic would set in. I would crumple to the floor in a heap—crying, miserable, overwhelmed. But waking after surgery, I was introduced to a whole other level of panic, so beyond my control it felt as if I were being forced to watch my own twisting, writhing body as a reminder that histrionics are reserved for the person who cannot come up with one single significant problem in her life.
The surgery was over, I had been moved out of the recovery room, the tumor had been successfully cut out, but something was still terribly wrong with me. I wiggled my toes—a faint memory dropping in, something about the significance of their movement. But I couldn’t move my legs. In fact, I couldn’t figure out where my legs were. Did they remove them in surgery? Why could I wiggle my toes but not feel my legs? I struggled to sit but was pulled up short by a bolt of pain in my back. I tried to reach out, to grab on to anything.
I was in a ward with three other patients. The fellow beside me moaned loudly and talked in his sleep. The gentleman in the bed across from me got up, walked to the middle of the room, and peed on the floor while the man diagonally across from me kept trying to escape. He was yelling at the nurses in English, but when that didn’t work, he hollered out random French words: “Monsieur! Soufflé! Bonjour!” Compared to my comrades, my panic attack seemed almost quaint. Rich’s face appeared. He hovered over me, a moon of worry. I locked eyes with him, trying to tell him it was the panic, not the surgery that was killing me. Before I knew what was happening, a nurse wearing impossibly thick glasses shoved an Ativan in my mouth. My tongue was as dry as a slab of brisket. I couldn’t generate enough saliva to make it dissolve.
“It’s still there.” I panted. “Can’t swallow it.”
“No, no,” she said. “It’s gone.”
Rich looked inside my mouth.
“It is there,” Rich confirmed. “She needs water.”
“It’s supposed to dissolve on its own,” Nurse Glasses insisted.
“She needs water!” Rich said, and water appeared.
I wanted to ask him: Had the worst happened? Was I paralyzed? He held my chin and gently tipped the water into my mouth. I must have swallowed; it must have worked.
•
It took seven and a half hours for Dr. Ginsberg to remove the meningioma from my spine.
“The most difficult surgery I have ever performed,” he told me.
The tumor had snuggled right into my back, happy to not be a bother to anyone until, like a closeted Broadway star, it broke free of its cramped quarters between T3 and T5 and sang in a shattering central nervous system vibrato, I gotta be me!
This was not standard meningioma behavior. Meningiomas are easily overlooked because they’re not scene-stealers like malignant tumors. They are relatively innocuous looking—egg-shaped with a tiny tail—and are generally e
asy to peel off whatever tissue they’ve attached themselves to. My meningioma, however, was as hard as a rock and completely adherent to the dura—the protective lining around my spine. I read this in the Operative Summary that appeared next to my bed soon after I was transferred out of the ward and into a semiprivate room. The words all ran together, a cluster of technical mumbo-jumbo I couldn’t begin to comprehend, save for a few notes, like this one: I called in my colleague for assistance . . . this was a challenging case, and having another pair of hands would assist in improving the patient’s quality of outcome. Together, the two surgeons painstakingly picked at the tumor, knowing every step of the way that if one or the other of them pulled too hard or became too frustrated or too aggressive, they could paralyze me.
When I opened my eyes again, it seemed three days had passed. I should have been going home, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d forgotten how to walk.
3
Forgetting (How to Pee)
I wasn’t paralyzed. This was good news, tremendous news, the best news. And yet, it was almost eerie how no one really talked about it, since, other than death, it was the only thing we had all feared. But something strange had happened to me. My legs were not only not paralyzed, they seemed to have surpassed being capable of movement—they had become unhinged. They wandered everywhere of their own volition. I watched with morbid fascination as they slithered off the bed, entangled themselves in the sheets, banged into my tray table, tried to kick my mother in the face as she put on my socks. Completely sidestepping my brain’s directives to move only where and when I told them to, they had gone rogue, and I had no idea how to control them. But they were functional. I was so grateful for this piece of good news, I chose not to look too carefully—not to look at all, in fact—at this other bizarre sign of trauma. An untapped resolve had taken shape inside me where curiosity used to exist. I didn’t want to know any more than I needed to know. But other people wanted to know. I had to give them more than my loopiness and stubborn ignorance to hold on to. I needed to show them that, on some level, I had control over my circumstances.
So I became obsessed with my bed.
With the exception of Rich, Joey, and Henry, I wouldn’t let anyone sit on it. My sheets had to be tightly tucked under the mattress, army-style, with my legs firmly tucked under the sheets at all times. If you leaned your hand on my bed, you were responsible for smoothing over the mess.
Walk It Off Page 3
