Caught red-handed

I whine a lot to my friends about the broken state of my brain. Yes, I am referring to the meatball in my head that I joke is constantly trying to kill me. It's one of those cynical kind of jokes that never gets a laugh, the kind where with your next breath, you throw your hands in the air and say, Universe, just kill me now, ha ha. Then when lightning fails to materialize and you keep on breathing, you say, well, not today, I guess, and keep on living and complaining your brain is trying to kill you. You know what I mean. No? Well. Ahem. Maybe it's just me.

Well, it's not all just me. My brain really is trying to kill me. Or at least, disable me. The evidence is on tape. Film. Whatever gets produced when you get an MRI.

I had another MRI, this one on my head, and an MRA for good measure, because why not, it was twofer day at the magnetic resonating center or whatever it's called. I put on blue scrubs and pretended like I was a healthcare worker, sitting in the waiting room with my blankey, nodding reassuringly to the other patients waiting their turn in the interrogation chamber. After an MRI, a CAT scan, an echocardiogram, and umpteen ultrasounds, not to mention an endoscopy and a colonscopy, I'm an old hand at this internal organ interrogation stuff. I ho-hummed through the insertion of the IV into my vein (yes, there is a valve there, yes, go ahead, keep digging, I'm used to it). Inside the room beyond the glass command cubicle, I laid down on the bed (which resembled the conveyor belt that trundles coffins into the oven). I smiled with gratitude at the tech who put a block of foam under my knees. I willingly put my head into the tray, like the prisoner going to the guillotine who still has faith that God will intervene up until the moment the blade comes down and liberates their brain, and gave the tech a thumbs up when the headphones started playing oldies.

I admit I got a tiny bit anxious when the tech put the cage over my face, six inches from my nose, but I shut my eyes and let myself drift away with Smokey Robinson. Thirty minutes in, the tech stopped the giant machine to inject me with the gunk. I had some trepidation, remembering an uncomfortable moment in the previous MRI, but this time around I didn't feel a thing. I had a bulb to squeeze in case I panicked, but I didn't need it. My veins (or arteries?) apparently said oh boy, yummy stuff, dye contrast! Let the magnetizing recommence! 

Forty-five minutes later, feeling like I'd been pummeled by an incompetent masseuse who was being yelled at by a gruff drill sergeant, the test was over, and I walked out into the hot morning sunshine.

Two days later, I got the report.

I am not crazy. It is not my imagination. It's not just a smoking gun. I see the gun, I see the bullet. My brain really is broken. The radiology report indicates I have the vascular problem that can cause vestibular paroxysmia. Not everyone who has this particular vascular condition gets my type of recurring vertigo and tinnitus, but the patients who have my type of recurring vertigo and tinnitus almost always have some kind of artery or blood vessel encroaching on the eighth cranial nerve. The good news is that there is no evidence of a tumor, lesion, or cyst that could be causing this paroxymia.

In other words, I'm a textbook case. Well, wait. I doubt if this condition is in textbooks yet. If it were, the ENTs I have met so far might not have been skeptical when I told them about it. I know doctors sleep through med school, who can blame them, but you'd think somewhere along the line when they learned about vestibular migraines they might have at least heard of vestibular paroxysmia.

For a brief moment, I felt smug satisfaction that I had diagnosed my malady correctly. Yay, me, so competent with Dr. Google! That wore off fast. Now I'm impatient and frustrated to get my hands on the remedy for the malady. I've had enough of being a doormat for some stupid artery that decided to get a little too cozy with a very sensitive nerve. I mean, come on, brain.

Well, I know you can't reason with a brain, anymore than you can petition the Universe with prayer. Arteries do what they do. Idiots, wackjobs, dictators, and politicians are similar. We can't cure it and we can't control it. If biofeedback, yoga, and aroma therapy would work, you know I would have been all over it. The futility of trying to reason with any body part, let alone an artery I cannot see or touch, is like shouting into the void. I feel the effects of its bad behavior, though, and now—ha, ha!—its inappropriate nerve cuddling has been caught on film. The red villain has been caught red-handed. Like to see you wiggle out of this one, you stupid artery. If I could get in there and strangle you, I would, although it would probably give me a stroke, but just for a moment, to express my extreme displeasure and frustration at the three years of torture, every minute of every hour of every day for three years, to listen to you horndog making out constantly with my vestibular nerve . . . surely I could be forgiven for my desire for revenge. 

I hope by next week's blog I will have received a call from the (highly chagrined) ENT (one can hope) telling me, yes, you were right, Ms. Patient We Didn't Believe. We see it right there, and even though we would still like you to see the neurologist (whose earliest appointment is the first week of February 2024), we are going to prescribe you one of those antiseizure medications as your reward for being such a patient patient instead of the raving puddle of whining anxiety we usually see. 

I have hope. But I know what happens when you wish for something. Sometimes you get it, and it ends up being worse than the disease. So (if you care), watch this space.

Planning my getaway

I remember a moment several months ago, sitting outside the care home with Mom in the dark. Even masked-up and six feet apart, we did a pretty good job of communicating. Mom asked me how things were going. I said, "Situation normal," and rolled my eyes. She didn't know what that meant. I explained. I'm sure she used to know, because she was married to a former Marine for over fifty years. However, dementia has a way of dispersing brain cells, and most likely some of the ones that evaporated from her head were the few that would have provided a definition of SNAFU. 

All that to say, situation normal. Mom may be gone, but I'm not, and life continues. I am not the boss of circumstances, no matter how I try to pretend I can predict or control what occurs. I don't fret a lot about it anymore. I have my multiple branching contingency plans (if this happens, then that; if that happens, then this!). I brush my teeth, scrub my skivvies in the tub, shop on Mondays, and continue to dismantle the detritus of my life so I can resurrect it somewhere in Arizona.

It's hard to plan for some things, though. Toothaches. Car problems. We all know teeth and cars go gunnysack sometimes, and we all know they don't heal themselves, although in the specific case of strange noises in cars, it helps to have a working radio.

Twenty-four years ago, shortly after I moved back to Portland from Los Angeles, one of my lower molars began to ache. I'd had a crown put on the tooth before I moved and figured the job was done. But teeth choose their moments to wake up and sing. I got a referral from a friend to a dentist, who admired the crown and then proceeded to break it when he drilled through it to give me a root canal. So, a root canal and two crowns later, you'd think the job would be done. Over the years, however, that tooth never gave up. The first dentist retired and died and a new dentist took over the practice. Every six months as I lay captive in the comfy chair, the new dentist would say, "Any teeth giving you trouble?" I would reply, "Well, just that one that refuses to die." Ha, ha, the dentist would laugh (her teeth were perfect). "The x-rays don't show anything," she would say, shaking her head.

The zombie tooth came to sluggish life a couple weeks ago, providentially coinciding with my six-month cleaning. I reclined in the chair, feeling awkward and wrong at being so close to other humans without a mask on my face. When the dentist arrived, I said, "This tooth! It's alive, I tell you, alive!"

She poked and prodded, gave me some things to bite on. The tooth didn't hurt much but I had this persistent belief that it shouldn't hurt at all, seeing as how it was supposed to be dead. 

"Well, root canals don't last forever, you know," she said. What? That is the first time I'd ever heard that. A dead tooth should remain dead, they should not be able to come back to life. This is not the dental equivalent of The Walking Dead. "I'll give you a referral to an endodontist," she said. Apparently she doesn't do root canals. 

As soon as I got my stimmy, I made the appointment with the endodontist. Her office was in a half-vacant building in SE Portland, not far from an area rife with shootings, conveniently located near the freeway for quick getaways. I was the only patient in the place, probably by design. The office looked like a 1990s hotel, all gray tile, gray carpet, and recessed strip lighting, very moody and mod. 

The endodontist was a tiny woman, much younger than me. She peered at a monitor nearby showing the CT scan of my jaw. I took a quick glance from the chair. I'd never seen teeth in such fine resolution. Those dental x-rays you see on your dentist's screen? Amateur hour. It's like the difference between microfiche and Blu-Ray Hi-Def plasma TV. 

"Wow, is that my tooth?"  

"Lay back. Let's see this thing." She put a light on her head and a microscope over my mouth and came at me with something shiny and sharp. "You have a rather small mouth."

"Yow!" I yelped around her fingers. 

"Nine millimeters," she said, oblivious to the tear edging out of my left eye. She jammed the probe in again. "Yep, nine millimeters. It looks like when they did the original root canal, they missed a little spot here in the back. And now the tooth has grown away from the jaw, leaving this large pocket, which has been infected, probably for a while."

I hoisted myself out of the chair and followed her into the room with the CT scanning machine. The room was set up like a movie theater, with several rows of folding chairs facing toward a large computer monitor, on which I recognized my CT scan. I imagined the endodontist and her staff unwinding after a long day by watching movies of suffering patients enduring remedial root canals.

She took a blank CD from a stack and inserted it into the computer. As the file transferred, we sat shoulder-to-shoulder on folding chairs in front of the screen. "See that dark gap there? That is where the tooth has detached. It's empty space, nothing there."

I gazed resentfully at my delinquent tooth.

"We could try to save it, but it probably wouldn't work." I turned and looked at her eyes because that is all you can see when a person has a mask on. She turned and looked at my eyes for the same reason. So there we were staring deeply into each other's eyes. I'm thinking a succession of thoughts: she has nice eyes, what the hell, Dr. Jim!, and why am I not more upset, I'm going to lose a tooth. 

"I'll send my report to your dentist," she said. "Here's a copy for you to take to Arizona."

The receptionist graciously gave me copies of the many forms I had filled out and signed in the waiting room promising not to sue if the remedial root canal went sideways. (Ha, ha, all moot, but I still wanted those copies.) She took my check for $330, and I took my throbbing jaw home, dismayed at the pain. No more half-dead zombie tooth. It's simmered down a little but I'm not back to baseline. Almost a week later, I'm still cutting my food into tiny pieces, cooking it to smithereens, and swallowing it whole. Even sneezing is dangerous—do you mash your teeth together when you sneeze? Right. I didn't think I did, either. 

This tooth wakes up and salutes every four hours. Tylenol and Advil are tiding me over until my dental consult on Tuesday. I think I know what will happen then. My lovely dentist (who specializes in cosmetic surgery, not root canals) will cluck her perfect teeth and express her sorrow that I'm leaving town before I can buy an implant. If all goes well, I expect I'll be taking antibiotics soon and by the end of April I will be driving out of town with a new hole in my head. I'm not afraid. I've had braces. 

On the bright side, today I took my Focus through the drive-through car wash for its annual scrub. I always clench up at first, afraid to take my foot off the brake and surrender to the giant maw. Once I relaxed and let go, the giant felt fingers and rivers of white suds worked their magic. I felt calmer and my car came out minus one layer of dirt and moss. Next task is to vacuum the interior. I want the old thing to look its best when I trade it in for my getaway car. 

A talkative passenger gets the Chronic Malcontent thinking

Thinking is something I do a lot of, maybe too much of, considering that thoughts don't necessarily lead to action. Maybe you have figured out how to think and make things happen—think and grow rich? Think and get happy? Think and create success? If so, I applaud you, you dynamic thinker, you. For me, thinking is a convenient way to avoid doing stuff. It's so much easier to think (dream, ponder, ruminate) than it is to take action.

Consider the ritual of setting our clocks back one hour in the fall, such a colossally arrogant manipulation of our ridiculous human perception of time. Wait, what? Sounds like I still haven't caught up on my sleep. The cat, of course, did not set his clock, being a creature of earth rotation, so he's been on me all week at the hint of dawn, not my best time.

This year, I celebrated the clock-changing ritual by flipping my mattress, changing my sheets, and vacuuming the rugs. I like to do that twice a year. No need to be overly ambitious, especially when it comes to vacuuming. Dust mites have to live too, you know. I try to welcome all god's creatures.

My right leg has been falling asleep when I sit at my kitchen table. I looked it up: leg falls asleep while sitting. Lots of exciting possibilities. (How did we survive before Google?) Thanks to multiple web authors of dubious repute, I'm having one long continuous stroke, I've got a pinched nerve (not sure what that is), or I'm enjoying some sciatica.

I attended an event in Salem last weekend. Salem is an hour drive south of Portland. I attend this event every year. I look forward to the hypnotic drive down I-5 to our state's capital. The drive there and back is better than the event itself, mainly because I get to be alone and out of my house. This year, a member of the group texted me to ask if she could ride with me. Caught off guard, I discarded my first thought (no fricking way, eew) and texted back, okay. She gave me her address, which I recognized as being in the heart of what we for many years have disparagingly called Skid Row, long before our entire city has become one heartbreaking Skid Row of houseless, homeless, sad, cold, tired, hungry, messed up people.

“Just cross the Burnside Bridge and turn right,” she texted.

“I'll pick you up at 8:30,” I responded, wondering if I would be able to walk by the time I arrived in Salem.

Despite the fact that the Burnside Bridge was closed for repairs that weekend, I managed to be ten minutes early, because besides being chronically malcontented, I am chronically early. I sat outside a decrepit apartment building in the loading zone, watching men and women shuffle by with backpacks and shopping carts. I perused their attire and demeanor. I saw their social interactions. I'm learning through observation—in my precarious world, homelessness is always lurking around the corner. I'm lucky, though: I have a car.

Eventually, my passenger appeared. Let's call her Lee. Lee hopped into my car and off we went.

From the time we left her door until the time we arrived at the event venue, Lee talked incessantly. I found out she is a poet. She works as a caregiver for an obese woman, often taking her client to the opera. She told me things I would never have dreamed of asking, stories of childhood trauma and abandonment. She shared about unsuccessful marriages and relationships. I heard about her mother, her father, her siblings, and the siblings from her father's multiple extramarital escapades, some of whom she'd recently met.

I kept my eyes on the road, nodding occasionally, grunting a few times, reluctant to say anything substantive. Lee didn't mind. In fact, I don't think she noticed.  The angst in her voice began to grate on my nerves. It took me a while to figure out that she is drama junkie. I cannot match that level of excitement. By the time we reached the event venue, I was thoroughly blockaded behind my personal bubble, determined to ignore her as much as possible during the day until it was time to make the return trek to Portland.

At 4:30, we were on the road home. I was hoping she would be tired, inclined to doze off, maybe, but no, she seemed as energetic as ever. At one point, Lee said, “I know I talk a lot.”

I took the opening. “Are you afraid of silence? Some people don't like too much silence.”

She was silent for a couple breaths. I thought, oh, yay, is she going to finally shut up? Then, oh yay, did I insult her enough to get her to shut up? Less than twenty seconds later, she said, “I wanted to show you that I was thinking about your question.” Oh, no. Thinking too much traps even drama junkie poets. No one is immune to thinking overload. I can claim no superiority: There's nothing special about me falling into the thinking sinkhole.

A less self-obsessed person would have realized my passive aggressive question was really a cry for relief, a desperate plea for silence. I'm the fool. It wasn't worth the battle. I dropped my passenger at her front door, avoided the hugging ritual, and said I'd see her around. I drove slowly home to feed my hungry angry lonely cat.

An hour later, I dragged myself to my mother's and collapsed on her couch.

“What's wrong with you?” she said. “You look beat.”

I told my mother about my passenger from hell. “She never shut up,” I moaned. “She kept staring at me while I was driving. The entire time, she stared at me. And she kept leaning over and tapping me on the arm.”

“Oh, I hate that,” my mother commiserated, and just like that, I felt the heaviness lift. After all these years, a kind word from Mom takes all the pain away.