"Pretty Miraculous"

One last post--I hope--on Benedict Ambrose's late, unlamented brain tumour.

Three months after his last operation, B.A. and I sat across from a brain surgeon, who peered avidly into B.A.'s face and said, "Nothing asymmetrical."

This was the first indication we had had that my husband's face might go asymmetrical after he was released from hospital. Maybe surgeons can't really tell what has happened to your face for a few weeks after they have cut things out of your brain. Or maybe the surgeon was just taking a personal satisfaction in an operation that went even better than he thought it could.

"It's pretty miraculous," said the surgeon.

Afterwards B.A. repeated, "He said the M-word! He said the M-word!"

I wasn't as excited because the "miraculous" had been modified by "pretty", and as happy as I am that B.A. isn't going to die anytime soon, and doesn't have brain damage, and doesn't seem to have nerve damage, I felt guilty that I didn't entirely focus on the canonisation of Venerable Margaret Sinclair when praying for B.A.'s tumour to disappear. In the end, I broke down and used holy oil touched to the bones of two different saints--one bottle sent from Arizona, and the other from Rome--and, really, I asked the Blessed Mother for help quite a lot and also prayed directly to the Source of All Miracles.

Given that as soon as B.A.'s breathing tube was removed he started yelling "Her Immaculate Heart will Triumph!," and he pronounced this at widening intervals over the next three days, I'm kind of thinking this miracle, under God, belongs to the Immaculate Heart.

(Nevertheless, I'll be making one last walking pilgrimage to the shrine of Venerable Margaret Sinclair. With flowers.)

And now life goes on. B.A. will return to work on Friday. He'll be part-time for awhile. He's picked up the permission-to-work letter from the GP.

For a couple of weeks now, he's been washing the dishes, taking out the rubbish and the recycling, and even reading up on the Scottish Enlightenment period, which is one of the nicest parts of his job. We're going on a trip to the Continent next week, and although we will have to tell security people B.A. has a delicate device in his head that can be messed up by magnetic x-rays, we're not expecting any trouble.

He has a zipper-like scar at the back of his neck, which he doesn't mind, and bumps and ridges on his scalp, which he minds less now that he's had a haircut that proves he still has enough hair to cover them.

He doesn't remember very much about the seven months between the diagnosis of his brain tumour and its removal. He's definitely hazy on the various operations in between and he seems to have forgotten all the horrid periods in which his health declined again and I had to beg reluctant doctors to see him. And I'm really glad about this because I remember these times in technicolour detail, and as painful as it was to be me, it was clearly much, much worse to be him.

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my terrified mind around was that the natural order, as I had experienced it, had been turned upside-down. I grew up in a traditional family in which the Dad was rarely ill, never seriously ill, and never unemployed, in both senses of that word. He went to "the office" (which was in a university) to work, and when he came home he went "down to his office" (which was in the cellar) to work some more. When something needed doing around the house, like fixing the washing machine, he did it. All sources of material goods, my stay-at-home mother was very adamant that we children understood, flowed from my father.  Ultimate honour and obedience, under God, belonged to my father. And when finally someone in the family did fall very ill indeed, it was my mother.

You can probably see where I'm going here.

I've always expected to take care of children, and I helped with the bathing and dressing and diapering and spoon-feeding of my youngest brother and sisters and, much less often, of my nephews and niece. But nothing prepared me for carrying out amateur physiotherapy and basic hygiene for my own husband. Or for overriding his complaints that he couldn't, he didn't want to, that hygiene preserves health was a myth, etc. Or for--in the most stressful period of my entire life--taking a full-time job--a very important, specialised and hard-to-get job, too, the answer to a prayer, but also a reversal of the natural order as I know it: the Man is the principal breadwinner, and he takes care of the Woman. Man, the head; Woman, the heart. Man, source of cash. Woman, reading books while doing laundry.

There were many low points, but the one that haunts me today is that, when after a long argument, I got B.A. into a hot bath, he screamed because the porcelain tub hurt him so much.

Oh, and that last bath, in which he simply couldn't get out, so I had to get in myself and pull him out. (That, I know now, was so incredibly dangerous, I should have called an ambulance instead.)

It wasn't like a nightmare from which we couldn't wake up because it was all real, and I knew it, even if the first doctor I spoke to that day didn't know it, or insisted that the last operation had gone so well. And then, believe it or not, a friend sent me an email claiming that mutual friends had entreated her to make a "formal intervention" telling me (in short) that I was culpably negligent in my husband's care. Part of the evidence, apparently, was my blogposts. There was too much about me and my interests, about which nobody gave a ****.

Blogging, which had always been a source of comfort in times of serious stress or depression, had led to this completely unexpected kick in the head by someone I had greatly admired and considered a dear friend. I had just returned home from the hospital to which I had managed to get B.A. admitted, and I couldn't believe my eyes. On the one hand, this person isn't married, and just as happily married 22 year olds don't really understand what it is to be 36 and Single, many lifelong Singles don't really know what "happily married" actually means, or what a spouse's illness does to the other spouse, or how one particular couple habitually interacts. On the other hand--cruel, cruel, CRUEL.

I'm very happy and thankful that B.A. is better. He isn't going to die from the late, unlamented tumour. He hasn't been permanently incapacitated. He's going back to work.  He's recovering. But I have not recovered.

I have not recovered. That's just how it is. And if you don't care because clearly Benedict Ambrose, who does not have a blog, and whose few articles you have never read, is so much more interesting, likeable, and valuable to you than I am, then ask yourselves how you know him at all.