My consultant seems angry with me — a cancelled appointment that I’d considered duplicated but he thought I’d missed; neither of us had understood the significance of results he hadn’t seen — and it takes me a while to understand what this anger’s for, right up until he softens and says, ‘I only saw your MRI this morning, and we found something.’ He beckons me around his desk and pauses, then asks, ‘What’s your background?’ and I snort, either in my head or out loud, and say, ‘Not neurology?’ and he smiles at me like I’d been trying to make him laugh, and frrrrrrrps with his mouse through the slices of my brain on the MRI before a cluster of darkness comes up, spreading through several layers, and I walk back around the desk before I fall down, and think, How is no one here with me?
He talks slowly and calmly, and I hate him; it’s an argument I’ve had in relationships that this tone isn’t calming, it’s controlling, and I don’t need control, I need empathy and information. But he says we’re in no rush, it’s not an emergency: it’s blood vessels that have probably been that way my whole life, and they irritated a nerve and caused my summer seizure. He hesitates to use the word ‘stroke’ in our conversation, but I make him say it.
I try to think of the questions I asked in Cancer Dad’s appointments, try to think of the information the people who I should have insisted be at this appointment with me would want to know. He mentions surgery, and uses the phrase ‘cutting it out’, which, frankly, when I’d prepared for a three-minute meeting where they’d just gently chastise me for even wasting their time by showing up, is not something I’d really anticipated. I forgive him, though, because he answers my same questions three or four times when, rather than listening, I keep looking out of the window and letting my thoughts bang against the opposite brick wing of the hospital.
When I get back home my mother is there, playing with the baby, and she and I try to hammer this diagnosis into some kind of acceptable development. I tell her that I’m jealous of Cancer Dad for getting all the way to see his children grown up, happy, settled, with children of their own. How lucky he was. She reminds me of a summer cocktail party on their RAF base that he’d taken her to when she was pregnant with my eldest sister; how by Christmas he was the only man from that party still alive. He had plenty of tastes of early mortality, thanks very much.
Shortly afterwards, the neurologist in the family gives me a call, all the way from Australia, and uses my favourite tone: no-nonsense, factual, conversational. He describes the blood vessel cluster as simply a kind of birthmark, and when my sister hisses in the background ‘a birthmark that could kill you’, I’m utterly reassured, knowing that she can read his body language and see the joke is OK.
When she hears that one potential treatment is glueing the grape-cluster of vessels, my sister offers to post me a glue gun for Christmas. I’ll just have to trust my brain to behave in the meantime.
