Good morning everyone! Carol Anne here.
It’s been a week since I woke up in the hospital and received the news that the surgery had been so successful within minutes. My recovery started to be equally amazing. I read the above and realize you all had a very different experience than I did. From my perspective. I had so lost a piece of myself and lost all the words to be able to describe how that was – that was the tumour – at the same time there was the cyst which was filled with fluid and was pushing my brain around, causing me to lose balance, lose muscle control, lose facial control control, and lose bladder control. So, waking up after the surgery almost immediately with the pressure from the cyst released, I felt stable again. My muscles did what I asked them to, and I very quickly regained physical strength.

Underneath that I found a piece of my brain that I’ve lost for a while, and I didn’t realize what part of me had disappeared until it started to come back. One of the things, perhaps the most notable to me, was lying recovering in a neuroscience floor where absolutely everyone around me had just had brain surgery. My brain eavesdropped and listened and learned, and it’s been a while since since I’ve chosen to learn and derive such pleasure from it.

The other really important thing to mention is that the healthcare system did not fail me when I needed it. It was there, and I was served, and I have been healed. The failure is more in our communities and the relationships that we no longer make time. My new doctor had seen me in person a couple of times, but until Morgan came in stamping his feet, he confessed that he didn’t know who I was so he couldn’t see a difference. So it’s less about Drs and access to Drs and more about building those health relationships where people learn you, know you, and care enough to pursue the next steps. It is more about the delivery of health care, than even the access to it. the reports are there, the caring delivery concepts – its time to not just add more stressed doctors, but to rebuild and make the systemic changes that allows caring back into such a caring profession.

So many blessings have come from this experience. I feel myself again – better than I have in over a year! As many of you know, we have an open household and a large family and all the work that we spend building relationships just came back to us in spades when we really needed it. All of you were much more afraid than I was. I kept hearing of our wonderful friends who stepped up and were there for my kids and my family

A lot of the anger that I have about the situation comes from what we normalized. About 10 years ago I remember going to the doctor being exhausted and I was told “you are a working mother of course you’re exhausted. The workplace is full of stress. You’re also looking after your children, how could you be anything but exhausted.” Was I having headaches? Sure. Did I identify them as being such? No. In hindsight, we’re seeing all of the justifications. I normalizied symptoms that I shouldn’t have been normalizing: the headaches were caused by not enough caffeine; the vomiting happened because I carry my stress in my gut; and so on. The only truly distinct thing that I could say over and over and over again is that “I’m just not myself.” But as a 50-year-old woman, it was so easy to Normalize that as menopause and depression and burn out.

Thank you all for following along this journey with us, not just in these postings, but actually walking beside us. We are also very very grateful. There is a myriad of things that could have gone really wrong in the middle times – I recognize not only my rediscovering my language – I can find the regular words – but my 25 cent words have come back too!

It could’ve turned out completely differently and all I can say is, for the moment, I’m alive. I am feeling well and we are really working hard at the moment to be in the moment and celebrate the moment where we are finding ourselves for now.

We are at the beginning of a journey and we will keep you posted as new information evolves. I will be going on Long term disability and Morgan and I are going to take some time, and enjoy some time to make space for everything that happened.