– I was hoping that brain surgery would teach me a thing or two. That I would wake up from my operation with some sort of hidden knowledge that’s only accessible to those who’ve had their skulls cracked open. It’s not that I thought I’d wake up speaking French or anything (though I wouldn’t have…
– There are things that you can imagine yourself saying. Things like, “Why thank you, yes, I will take a third helping of dessert.” or “We can hang out at our house, but you guys have to not touch the dust piles. I’ve been collecting them for three months, and there’s one specimen that I…
It’s been four long years since my brain surgery, and I’m now so removed from the experience and most of its consequences that I almost need to remind myself that it happened. In the weeks before, when the tumor on my hypothalamus was an unknown variable, my friend Mindy said to me, “Hopefully, one day this…
Exactly three years ago, I had brain surgery for the first and only time. Last week, my friend Chad had his fourth brain surgery. We started writing to one another during that strange, pivotal summer three years ago. I was still groggy from the procedure and ravenous from the steroids I was on. Chad had had…
I got an email the other day from someone who was about to have brain surgery. This, in and of itself, isn’t anything new – since writing about my own surgery, I get a couple of emails a week from people who are in similar (or, as is often the case, far scarier) situations. But…
Things are different now. I feel like I could make a note in the timeline of my life to reflect this. “Here is everything that happened before brain surgery. Here’s everything after.” – I have trouble with this; I’ve never been that good with change. I like things to stay as they are. I become…
-\ Today, a friend of mine is having surgery to remove a brain tumor. We talked about it a little bit last year, not long after my surgery. His doctors were able to confirm right away that his tumor wasn’t cancerous (which is all kinds of YES), but in the last few months, it started…
Last week, I had my regular MRI check-up, and once again, by the grace of science and luck and the universe, it looked good. “Unremarkable” is the technical term that radiologists use. It’s one of the few times in your life that hearing that is just … nice. – So don’t have to get another…
Last week, Twitter … did something. I don’t actually know the machinations of it, to be honest, and I’m at the point where I’m a little too fatigued to care. I heard whispers of something amiss. That Google could no longer crawl the site; that people were getting notifications that they’d exceeded their daily recommended…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Available Now!
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