She registered surprise, but nodded.
My phone rang. Jari said, “My office, seven a.m. I’ll escort you to the appropriate places and spend the day with you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I want to.”
Milo and Sweetness shook my hand and wished me luck before they left. Sweetness couldn’t help himself and gave me a bear hug, almost choked the life out of me.
I sat down on the couch next to Kate. “Should I have discussed tomorrow with you before planning the other surgeries?” I asked.
She put an arm around me. “No. I was thrilled. You wouldn’t have done it unless you believe you’re going to live.”
Maybe I was addled because of the migraine. We had a newborn in the house. It didn’t occur to me how incredibly unfair to her it was for me to choose to have knee surgery and cripple myself, on top of whatever damage brain surgery might cause. I placed a terrible burden upon her.
7
The next days remain blurred wisps of images. It was Monday morning, the eighth of February. Not too cold, just below freezing but windy. I took the tram to Jari’s office downtown, not far from the railway station. Tomorrow’s brain surgery deleted most of the coming days’ memories.
The gunshot scar on my face was removed with laser resurfacing. There were tests, X-rays. Surgeries. Nights in the hospital, waking and not understanding where I was. I have a blurry image of Kate’s face as they put me on a gurney and wheeled me off to an operating theater.
The thought of surgery made me think of all the autopsies I’d witnessed. The whine and smell of an electric bone saw at work. The hushed murmur of a scalpel carving flesh. I was dizzy, woozy, confused.
Eventually, I came back to myself. A surgeon came in and informed me that the knee surgery was a success. After several weeks of physical therapy, I would have full range of motion to the limits of the prosthesis, meaning only a slight limp. I should have full weight bearing with a cane within six weeks.
Another surgeon came in and told me they got the whole tumor. No complications. I remember seeing Kate, Anu, Jari. I remember asking Kate to let me look at myself in her makeup mirror. With the scar gone, and a small bald spot with a stitched-up incision on the front of my head, I barely recognized myself. Mostly, I slept.
When I awoke the next morning, the symptoms of the previous day had mostly passed. My headache was gone. It had tortured me for a year, and now it was as if it had never existed at all. And great changes had occurred within me. I felt like a different person. Despite the medication I had been given—painkillers and tranquilizers—it was as if my thoughts had been muddled for my whole life, and now, suddenly and miraculously, I was clear in the mind, sharp as a razor.
Jari warned me that some of my perceptions and attitudes might be altered, that it was typical for brain surgery post-op patients, sometimes for a considerable length of time. I wondered if this feeling that my thinking was no longer diminished was false, the result of surgery, or if I truly was more intelligent now. Along with this new sense of clarity, I felt a sense of certainty, as if when they removed my tumor they cut away my angst and remorse along with it.