Poseiden Barge
Tim Conrad's The Machine We Trust, a health update for Kara, and hello for all
Good morning! This is a public post, which is a less frequent occurrence lately as I wax medical about a second brain surgery I recently underwent. I will give a few updates below for narrative / temporal reasons. Also, who doesn’t like to go on about their medical journeys?
Actually, I don’t like to get too technical, even in my real life, and/but I’ll try to give a little update so we can all follow the plot. It’s also good practice to write as if no one else has been listening to your inner monologue for months. How are your own summarizing / book report skills doing lately?
xx
Two links before we begin. You can pre-order Tim’s book The Machine We Trust on Barnes & Noble’s website here. I also woke thinking about this essay called The Viewer and the View by Freya Rohn that I recently loved, about women who have found the night to be an especially productive time for creative work. Freya’s work as a poet and researcher are so clear. I am always fed by the streams of her intelligence. I have also always been someone who works well at night. Since becoming a mother, my nighttime vigils have all but dried up but in high school and college, I found so many helpful hours studying, writing, tending in the quiet, black hours.
This is really a post to celebrate the most important thing in my world, which is that the hole in my belly left by part of my surgical procedure - which included drilling into a bone in my head and then replacing parts of that bone with a fat graft from my belly - has closed.
I’m sorry to be both glib about a fat graft and also cram it right up front in this post buuuuuuuut is there anything better than having a hole that shouldn’t really be there close up on its own in your body? I submit there is not!! (Insert all the hole jokes you want here.)
At bedtime last night, I said to Tim, “Did I tell you the hole in my belly is finally closing up?” He said, “Yes. Three times.” LOL. I reserve the right, both as a recent brain surgery patient and mother of small children, to repeat myself as many times as I want.
Also, it solidified to me just how great my soul is finding this news. End of active hole = nirvana!
I guess the high level update is that my doctors always wanted to do a second surgery after my initial one for a benign brain tumor in 2021. I put them off for a while as I healed in all the ways - physically, mentally, emotionally - from the first. In January of 2023, they started making noise about doing the second stage of the removal process. My tumor wasn’t growing at the time so the news caught me off guard. I thought about it for awhile, consulted with the surgeon who would do part of the second surgery, and agreed to put the procedure on my calendar, with the assurance that I could “always cancel it.” This concession, while being freeing, was also somewhat nerve-wracking. Sometimes it is easier to just be told what to do.
I was scheduled for the second surgery in December 2023. Days before the procedure, I got news that one of my doctors had an accident and needed to postpone it. I texted Tim the news: an unmolested Christmas at home! We started joking I’d been granted a stay of execution. It was a sweet, quiet Christmas, full of the kids working on various gifts they’d been given, low-key cooking, and mentally preparing to get a call any day.
One Thursday or Friday, I got a voicemail announcing a new surgery date. Not: “Are you free then?” or “Does this date work for you?” Just: show up and we’ll get the rest out. Once I got over the curt cheer of that voicemail, I thought, This is kind of what I wanted. Just tell me where to go. Let’s do the hard thing and get it over with.
There is something freeing in surrendering to your life just as it is: the impossible, the ungainly, the difficult contortions. It isn’t easy, necessarily, but there is something sweet in taking all of it in, saying to the souls inside: Hey, sweeties. We got this.
I had the surgery last week and went home on the third day. There are approximately twenty-five staples in my head. I was able to wash my hair on Monday, which I submit as being the thing next to nirvana if you’ve ever been prohibited from doing so. There are little stutter steps happening. I’m not in a great deal of pain but some days I can feel the insides of my head like a heat map of sensation. Tim and I went to pick up a prescription at the store after dinner last night. Kneeling on the ground smelling shampoos near the pharmacy, I felt a real zing of happiness.
Yesterday, one of the kids was home sick. I was treated to a whole reading of Pizza and Taco, a middling series about, that’s right, a pizza and taco. There are fart jokes and bad puns and dubious illustrations but having a whole book read to me by my littlest was my favorite part of the day. It’s very hard to convince this one to read aloud, but when I’m “too tired” they read to me. And I love it so much.
What are your favorite things lately? Who’s reading to you when you’re too tired? Sending love, wonder, and lots of time. One thing that is increasingly clear to me: there is no rush. Everything you need is right here. It takes courage and patience sometimes, to listen for it. But it’s there. I promise.
Kara
P.S. I forgot to recap that my doctors believe they got all of the rest of the benign tumor. There was also little to no facial nerve damage, a blessing beyond words <3
"There is no rush." Thank youuuu for this. Beautiful post. Thank you also for that BARGE phone number. Dialing now! xoxx
As someone whose surgical holes had a distressing tendency not to heal, I so completely get the joy of this. 100% worth mentioning multiple times. I’m grateful for the update and glad it went as smoothly as it did — and that you got to enjoy a Christmas without it hanging over you.