My grandmother died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 45. It shook my mom’s world, and she’s always wanted her four daughters to closely monitor our brain health. We all had baseline brain scans done in our early 20s, at her request, so the doctors would have a basis for comparison, should we ever have a problem. In her early 40s, my maternal aunt had an aneurysm, confirming my mom’s fear that this condition runs in the family.
What’s scariest about an aneurysm (a weakened blood vessel in the brain), is that people generally don’t know they have one until it ruptures, and a ruptured brain aneurysm can kill you pretty quickly. It’s a terrifying thought.
On Tuesday morning, on my way to work, I noticed that I couldn’t see clearly out of my right eye. Being a contact lens wearer, this is a pretty typical phenomenon for me. I probably got makeup on my lens. I figured I’d just clean it when I got to work, and that’s exactly what I did. I popped the lens out of my eye, gently scrubbed it in my hand with a little saline, and popped it back in. Then, I started to teach.
My eye continued to bother me throughout first period. I began to think that maybe the lens was scratched or torn. I checked again. This time, the lens ripped in my hands. Crap! My spare pair of glasses was in my other vehicle, and my options were becoming limited. I’m legally blind without my contacts, so there was no way I was going to get through the day with only my left eye. I asked a co-worker to drive me home to get my glasses and a spare pair of lenses. I was embarrassed and contrite, feeling silly that I had to leave work and that I had to drag my friend with me. She reassured me that she didn’t mind, and we had a few laughs on the way to and from my house. I thought this was going to be the big event of the day.
I was mistaken.
Having made the trip home and having put in new contacts, I assumed the rest of the day would be uneventful. Oddly, the vision in my right eye was still not right, so I decided to scrap the contacts altogether. I put on my glasses, and went back to work. I co-teach a class with a really great teacher. She’s talented and smart and funny and great with the kids. Luckily for me, she’s also super observant.
As I explained the morning’s events, she was looking at me oddly. She said, “I don’t want to freak you out, but maybe you should go see the nurse.” I looked at her quizzically, and she explained, “Your one eye is super dilated, and the other one isn’t. I just think you should go get checked out.” At this point, I still thought it had something to do with the lenses or the time I had spent poking at my eye. I took a look in the mirror and went to talk to the school nurse.
The nurse suggested that I call my eye doctor. And despite knowing better, I Googled this bizarre symptom while I waited for the receptionist to answer the phone. I scrolled through my search results while I explained my situation and made an appointment with the eye doctor. But I could no longer focus.
When you look up “What could cause only one eye to dilate?” the top answer on the list is “brain aneurysm.”
I called my primary doctor. I tried to stay calm. The receptionist put me through to a nurse. I told her about the single dilated eye. I explained the thing about the contacts, but also the part about my family history, and she put me on hold to talk to the doctor.
When she came back, I waited for her to say, “Keep that 1pm appointment with your optometrist.” I wanted her to say, “It’s probably just irritated.” But she didn’t say any of those things. She said, “How quickly can you get to the emergency room?”
You know those moments when time stops? I was talking to the nurse and trying to text my husband and wondering if I should get a ride or call an ambulance. At the same time, my heart was breaking in half because I was imagining what my kids would do without their mom, and wondering if I was going to spend my last minutes making frantic phone calls and what if I passed out before I could tell anyone what was happening to me? I was terrified, and I started to cry.
I grabbed my purse and began walking toward the main office. Tears streamed down my face. A friend and coworker was walking about 20 feet in front of me. I called her name, too scared to be embarrassed. I asked her to walk with me. I told her what was happening. She walked me to the office and ran to get her keys.
I went to the principal and explained that I had to leave. I was totally unprofessional and slightly incoherent and I couldn’t stop the tears. She was kind and supportive and made sure that my friend was okay driving me.
The ride to the hospital wasn’t bad. I promised my friend that I wouldn’t stroke out in her truck, and she joked and distracted me and was generally wonderful. When we pulled up to the emergency entrance, she asked if I wanted her to stay. I promised that my husband was on his way, assured her that I would be fine, and promised to text later. I walked in the front doors, and she pulled away.
I didn’t realize how scary it would be to be alone in that waiting room. I walked in, and was directed to sit down and wait for a receptionist to check me in. There was only one person in front of me, but the two minutes I waited felt like an eternity. My mind began to race again. What if I had made it here, to the hospital, but I passed out before I could tell anyone who I was or why I was here or what was happening to me? What if THESE were actually my last minutes? I didn’t want to die alone in this hospital. I realize now that all of these thoughts sound melodramatic, but in that moment, they were real.
I’m typically an optimist; quick to dismiss physical symptoms as ‘it’s probably nothing.’ I don’t like to dwell on the negative because I honestly believe that humans attract energy and if you spend too much time on negative thoughts, you attract negative energy. I tried to distract myself. I tried to pray. I tried to think positively. But I COULD NOT stop worrying about dying.
After a two-minute eternity, I was called up to the receptionist. I leaned in closely and said, “Look at my eyes.” The two women at the desk cast concerned glances at each other. When I said that I have a family history of brain aneurysms, they called the triage nurse over. They got me a wheelchair. They took me right away.
As soon as I was talking to people again, the panic resided a little. I made an offhand comment to the triage nurse. I said something to the effect of, “It’s probably nothing. I probably just scratched it while I was messing with my contacts.” She looked at me and scrunched up her face and shook her head, while she gently replied, “That doesn’t happen.” She explained that external trauma like that wouldn’t cause dilation. It might cause your eye to water or swell or get red. But a dilation problem would be related to the brain or the optic nerve. They had already requested a CT scan to check it out.
I felt like I had gotten the wind knocked out of me. Again, I thought of my kids. The nurse took my blood pressure and took me to a stretcher and started to wheel me into the back. I assumed I was going to a room, but it was a busy day, so I was parked in the hallway in an area that they use as a patient ‘room’ when they’re out of space.
Two different doctors came to talk with me. They asked me about medications. They numbed my eye and poked at it to check the pressure. They did vision tests. They asked me about medications again. They asked me about eye drops. They told me they were just waiting for the CT scan. They told me to sit tight and try to relax.
I rolled over on the stretcher to face the wall and I tried to be brave and I tried to be positive and I tried to pray. Mostly I just cried. Silent tears, facing the wall in the hallway of the emergency room. I realized that wasn’t helping things. I called my mom. She’s a nurse. I wanted her opinion and her reassurance and a little bit of distraction.
When I told my mother where I was and why, there was a long pause at the other end of the line. I realized my mistake. My mom was terrified. It took her only a moment to recover, but I could hear it in her voice. She said things like, “You’re in the right place,” and “I’m glad you noticed it so quickly,” and “I’m not scared, but of course, I’m concerned,” and I realized that I probably just shaved a few months of my mother’s life. She did great, as moms do, but she was not in a position to be objectively reassuring. She was afraid, too. When we hung up, she texted that she loved me, and I began to cry again.
When my friend had dropped me off at the hospital entrance, I told her the truth when I said that my husband was on his way. What I didn’t tell her was that he had to take his work van from his job back to the shop, get on the motorcycle (which he had ridden to work), ride the motorcycle an hour back to our house, pick up his personal vehicle, and then come to the hospital. There was no way it would take any less than two hours.
As I sat in that hallway, my mind began to race again. You see, the motorcycle that my husband was riding is mine. He likes to borrow it sometimes, and we both love to ride. But he’s a less experienced rider than I am. He also has a bad track record on a motorcycle, and has laid one down more times than either one of us would like to admit. And anytime he’s riding, I get a little nervous. He always calls or texts to tell me when he’s arrived safely. So after about an hour, I began to anticipate his call. After an hour and a half, I began to worry in earnest. What if he crashed? What if we both wound up in separate rooms in this ER? What if our kids came home to an empty house because both of their parents were in the hospital?
I knew this was ridiculous. I realized this pattern of thinking was absurd and unhelpful. So I decided to distract myself again. I picked up the phone. I considered calling my dad or my sisters, but I didn’t want to scare them. I thought about texting my best friend, but she would want to do something to help, and she was in the middle of teaching. I decided to text my church friends and ask for prayers.
This was a good call. I have a few women friends from church with slightly more flexible schedules than my teacher friends. They responded right away, with a perfect balance of concerned prayer and inappropriate jokes. They made me laugh and I didn’t feel so alone and I was able to distract myself with these text messages until my husband finally arrived.
I didn’t realize that I was holding my breath until he arrived and the air rushed into my lungs. He sat next to me and held my hand and joked and distracted me and asked questions and hugged me. Just having him there made all the difference. The fear began to dissipate.
They finally did the CT scan. The results were unremarkable. They sent me home, confident that my brain was fine, but unsure of what the problem had been. My eye was still dilated and I couldn’t see right. Ultimately, it stayed like that for 12 hours. They referred me to an optometrist for the next day.
I couldn’t see. So I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t teach. I couldn’t ring bells with the church bell choir as planned. I cancelled everything for that evening and the next day, feeling slightly guilty, but overwhelmed with enough fear to drown out the guilt. Jack and I both contacted our jobs to plan for another day out of work so we could go to the opthamologist and get this figured out.
We went to bed on Tuesday evening with my eye still dilated and a lot of fear about what might be going wrong. I woke up on Wednesday morning with perfect vision and normal pupils. Not surprisingly, we went to the appointment, and the eye doctor told me that my vision was fine and that my pupils were normal. She asked me a lot of questions about drugs or medications or eye drops, trying to pinpoint what the problem may have been. Ultimately, the answer was, “We don’t know.”
“We don’t know, but you seem fine now,” was the conclusion. “Come back if it happens again,” was the general consensus. “Sometimes these things just happen and we don’t know why,” was offered by way of explanation.
So I’m glad it ended well. I’m glad it wasn’t any sort of tragedy. But I’m left feeling scared and insecure and worried about what actually happened. I’m left feeling guilty that I left work “for no reason” because no reason was ever identified. I’m left feeling like a child who overreacted to a minor injury; as if I somehow made it up or brought it upon myself.
I’m hopeful that writing this all down will help me to let some of that go. I want to process these feelings of guilt and fear and panic, and then be able to move on. I want to feel gratitude for my good health, for as long as it lasts. I want to be fully present in the joy of spending time with my family. I want to be confident in my professional capabilities without second-guessing what my colleagues might be thinking.
But I’m not there yet. Today, I’m still a little scared and guilty and worried. I’m trying to be okay with that. These feelings? These crappy, uncomfortable, yucky feelings? They almost always have something to teach me. I just have to be willing to sit with them long enough to learn the lesson. Thanks for sitting with me.
The first time we spent a long weekend at Lake Chateaugay, Cal was an infant, Lee was three, and college was still fresh in my memory.
This year, we went up for a four-day weekend, and during our time there, I couldn’t help but reflect. The house has transformed along with our family. The big room we stayed in our first year is now the master bedroom. It has bay windows and carpeting and the scientific paraphernalia is long gone. The dark room is a laundry room, and the incubators have been replaced with bunk beds and a pool table. The old pontoon has been replaced with a bigger, better boat. Other new additions include a deck, a lean-to, a kayak, and a dishwasher. The screened in porch is now a finished room, with an outside wall of windows and the most spectacular view you can imagine.
I grew up with the kind of mom who spent weeks using spray paint and Styrofoam to create the type of Halloween costumes that won the school contest every year. I had the kind of mom who made a home-cooked meal for dinner every night; the kind of mom who vacuumed every day. She was the kind of mom who wouldn’t leave the house without makeup, but also the kind of mom who would wipe off her makeup in a heartbeat to jump in the pool and swim with us.