I Nearly Died and Got Life’s Best Education. One could measure the distance between life and my death in millimeters. Two millimeters, if you really must know. My surgeon’s razor-sharp blade slices silently and achingly slowly towards the pulsating carotid artery in my brain. And still closer. There is no coming back from nicking that blood vessel, no tying it off with sutures or cauterizing it.
The operating room air seems oppressive, and several medical personnel in blue-gray scrubs animate the room. The tall, self-assured anesthesiologist bets me that I cannot count to ten before falling asleep. I believe I will win the wager. My last memory before entering the abyss. I lay supine on a frigid steel table, anesthetized, skull about to be pierced.
The surgeon confidently perches next to a side table containing the tools he will insert to remove the golf ball-sized tumor that lives in the brain behind my nose. The lights above me blaze, illuminating the entire operating theater with pure white light.
Imagine that the technician has the GPS coordinates reversed. The scalpel, which had entered the crescent-shaped burr hole in my right frontal skull, stops just millimeters short, and I survive.
“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak?” Harry interrupted again.
“So he can sneak up on people,” said Ron. “Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking.…”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
My story is a disorienting journey into a rabbit hole, with undetectable monsters and three brain surgeries in two weeks (marked by a near-death mistake). It is a tale of right becoming left, time compression, a central nervous system infection, and my emergence from this surreal world with clearer vision.
One bathes in its rays as you lay in the sun. Its halo envelopes your electronic devices. X-rays, CT scanners, mammogram machines, nuclear power plants, and even deep space are alive with it. It sneaks up on you, as you cannot see, feel, smell, or hear it.
And on that fateful day, the medical implant I need to remove from a woman with cervix cancer glows with it as well. And it silently snakes its way towards me. Radioactivity.
As a radiation oncologist, I know the importance of space: Radiation exponentially falls away with distance.
Of course, I also know all about the principle of ALARA, which stands for “as low as (is) reasonably achievable.” This approach means making every reasonable effort to maintain exposures to ionizing radiation as far below the dose limits as practical.
But I struggle to get the metal apparatus with the radiation sources out. Damn. It won’t budge. My colleague had packed the device so tightly that I need to move a bit nearer. Just a bit closer. And with a little more anxiety, the fateful move: I crane my head forward to get a better look.
The radiation (and the electrons bombarded by it) moves chaotically in the cells of my brain’s frontal lobe. In milliseconds, the rays zip into various cellular molecules, including chromosomal DNA in the nucleus of my cells. Would they hit a tumor suppressor gene? In that remarkably tiny slice of time and the dead of night, my brain tumor is born.
It is two in the morning, and I hear the rhythmic pitter-patter of a gentle Seattle rainfall in the background. I return to that hour in my mind, again and again.
In the Intensive Care Unit, I awaken from uneasy dreams and find myself alive. In that in-between space between sleep and wakefulness, I wonder what’s happened to me. I slightly lift my head to see my body still attached to me, enrobed in a flimsy blue hospital gown. Through the window, I gaze at the gray Seattle sky.
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