Exit

February 13 2007

After surgery

I cried for a while; out of exhuastion, relief, happiness, terror. . . every emotion that i had ignored and suppressed, stuffed deep down inside me the entire day; in the interest of bravery, survival and sanity; came shooting out of me. i was immensely proud of, and surprised at, what i had managed to do, especially considering that up until the moment i had entered that room in the morning i wasn't sure if i was even going to be able to go through with the whole procedure. you know you always play the 'what if' game, but you never really know until you are faced with the situation. i had always pictured myself as the type who would break down, lose my mind, "i don't know how i would deal with it" (especially since i am a terrible cry-baby). but, you know what i discovered, the human spirit (MY human spirit) is incredibly strong and i can take whatever is thrown at me and i can do it with dignity and an iron-will. i AM superwoman! of course, i was also traumatised and freaked out by the whole experience. the fact that i had an AVM had been difficult enough for me to wrap my head around, i couldn't even begin to think about everything that had just been done to me that day. even now, i feel slightly ill just thinking about it and i know that colin and my dad were equally freaked out by the whole ordeal and also very relieved and proud to see me sans head frame.

after the head frame was removed i had to wear a bandage around my head for a few hours, which made me look like a loony! like something out of Monty Python, but after all that pain and suffering there was hardly any bleeding when the screws came out and i felt okay. i had a monster headache, full-body nausea, droopy eyelids and it would take my skull a few days to recover from the squashing it had received, but i could wobble around a bit and all things considered i didn't feel too bad. in fact, after the crying and terror came euphoria, with me wandering around my hospital room joking, giggling and generally just being silly while my father and colin desperately tried to get me to rest. and rest i did, for one last night at taipei veteran's hospital.

i was allowed to leave on the tuesday, medication in hand, and i wasn't sorry to go. the patients in neurological/neurosurgical wards are pretty unnerving, lost people. they have lost control of their emotions, their reason or their body. there was one man who used to shout all day and another who would just wander into your room and stare blankly at you. it is a depressing place to be and i have the utmost respect and admiration for the doctors and nurses who work there with patience and concern for every single patient. i had a touching farewell with the head nurse, mei-rong who had formed a strange attachment to me over just 3 days. i think because i was a young foreign girl, i was exotic and interesting. she loved playing with my curly hair, which is so different to taiwanese people's dead straight hair and she loved my blue eyes as all taiwanese people have black eyes (not just dark brown, black). i think her, dr. chung and dr. tai also feel a strong sense of responsibility towards me. i have no family here, i am an alien in an alien culture with only colin to help. so, all three have gone out of their way to care for me and monitor my progress more closely than they would a taiwanese patient, perhaps also because my case is so extreme/weird/rare. also because they are good people and it is hard to find truly good people in this world. i am very lucky with the amount of truly good people i ended up with.