By Jude Green 2015
Living with a tumour in your head...
The site all about my brain tumour journey, with excerpts from others, useful advice and an active blog...
WEDNESDAY
1, It's the first of December and myself and Rosalynn (my close friend and colleague that I'd called after my MRI yesterday) are sitting in the office. (affectionately known as the cupboard as it has no windows and no room to swing a cat!) We were pretending that yesterday didn't happen.
We had our strong nurse heads on and had been through every eventuality and decided that If I was our patient we would have called by now with a diagnosis so it can't have been anything that perhaps I was just being a typical nurse and using the knowledge I had! Dramatically!!!
Oh such wishful thinking!
As if on cue the phone rings!
It was the consultant's secretary asking me to come in before the weekend. (it was already wednesday!) It was obvious to me at that point that this wasn't good.
My whole world stopped, my palms went sweaty, I went white and all I could manage despite all my nurse training was to ask; "is it urgent?"!!
2, Oh come on Jude of course it's urgent otherwise they wouldn't be ringing!!!
She got the consultant on the phone and he asked if I wanted to know there and then what it was. He was empathetic to my career, knew that I would diagnose myself so much worse than it really was if I didn't know for two days!
"Jude you have a brain tumour. We think it is an accoustic neuroma. It's a slow growing benign tumour."
Wow! I never believed that my body really reacted to things, but after that phonecall my mind jumped several paces into the future, I was dead and buried and as it turns out...sobbing into my hands!
The shock was immense but it was the most surreal experience. I felt no different, but here I was learning I had a tumour in my head. Shouldn't I feel ill? Shouldn't I go home?
In the next few hours I worked on auto-pilot. I consented patients for our research trial, I took blood, I did data entry, I laughed AND we both even went out for a work do!
3, Was this going to change my life?
Will I be deaf? Will I be paralysed?
Within about an hour of hearing what was happening I began to hate my tumour. Was it going to kill me?
I maybe have more knowledge than the average person being a nurse but it hinders more than helps!! There were certain things I knew that weren't going to be fun or good and I was going to some really dark places because of it. They weren't all going to be associated with this but my mind was a mess.
I needed to personalise this thing in my head. I needed to talk about it whenever the need took me, but not obviously and at the same time use it as an excuse and blame feelings on it. So....there we have it. Morris was born!
That night eating out for dinner I was able to talk about "Morris" without anybody knowing what I meant. Rosalynn and I could laugh about how Morris made me eat the dessert and how maybe I do this or that because of Morris. Most importantly it made my tumour become part of me. Become something less scary and there was a way to get out how I was feeling without talking "tumour" all the time.
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Morris even made me fall off my chair!! (Or was that the wine?! Maybe drinks after such a phonecall are not well advised!)
