Artifacts

I only ever thought I might die once. That was on a vacation on a sidewalk in Tokyo in 2011 when the world underneath me wouldn't stop heaving. It was benign at first until the 60-second mark and then the 90-second mark when it seemed the force wasn't going away without me.

That earthquake started off innocent, but many of life's rattlers also do. I woke up in the night about six weeks ago with a strange tingling sensation on the top part of my head. I didn't think much of it until two weeks later when I was having a conversation with Daniela and felt a similar sensation, only this time on my face. Both incidents happened on the left side of my head only.

Thinking of a long lost friend my age who died earlier this year of a stroke, I told Daniela what I was feeling. She insisted we go to the hospital. I asked if she was sure and she said yes. So, we brushed our teeth and walked to the nearby emergency room where we waited for hours--me refreshing my fantasy football score over and over until my phone faded to sleep.

The doctor looked me over and said he didn't think anything was wrong, but with my kind of symptoms they (legally) couldn't just send me home. He ordered a CT scan and minutes later I was taking off my belt and emptying my pockets of anything metal. The machine sucked me in, took a picture and just as quickly spit me back out.

"Everything looks normal," the doctor said. Photos of the insides of my skull flipped by on his computer screen. "But we found this." He stopped on one slide in the middle of the group. Like the rest of the images, it was colored solid gray with healthy brain matter. Except for one part. He pointed at a dark little blip in the back corner of my head.

"We think this is a cyst," he said.

"What?" I replied.

He assured me that nothing was wrong. That this wasn't causing my numbness symptoms. That it probably wasn't effecting me at all. He told me I've likely had it since birth, which made me want to say, "Well, maybe don't tell me about it."

But he did.

Three days later, at his request, I stretched out on another hospital's table and slid into another large machine, this time for an MRI. My head, throughout the process, was cradled in a plastic cage and my forehead was taped down to the board. I was asked repeatedly to remain perfectly still. The conveyor belt beneath me slid inside the mothership. I watched the grey panels pass by overhead.

Getting an MRI is exactly like the final 30 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you haven't seen the movie, allow me to clarify: It freaks you out. What the main character Dave saw in a vortex of colors, I heard through clinched eyes, clinched fists and earplugs as the machine rattled, thumped, hummed and chirped at a deafening volume for 25 minutes. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life.

I got a "break" halfway through, although honestly it was even worse than being in the machine. They pulled me out and, without being able to move my head to watch, injected my arm with a dye that would flow through my brain and show up in their images--an idea that honestly left me much more uneasy than it should have.

I laid my head in Dani's lap in the cab on the way home. I just wanted to get back to America and get some answers.

The truth of the matter was, I didn't trust what the doctors were telling me. Cyst, maybe, but I figured these guys had it all wrong. What if it was something more? The fact that I was in the middle of reading "Shrinkage"--author Bryan Bishop's memoir on living with a brain tumor--did not help in the slightest. What timing.

Just as difficult was the numbness that continued to recur in spurts. I was back in the US by then. I felt it in restaurants during meals with old friends and on the familiar interstates I used to drive. I played the winless game of wondering if I was feeling something serious. What about now?  Do I feel weird? What about now? Daniela would see on my face that something wasn't right. She asked me about it. I would just lean close, kiss her head and tell her I loved her.

Like that earthquake that started with a slow churn under my feet, the trouble I felt really ruffled me when I realized it wasn't stopping. The doctor in Brazil told me not to worry. The articles on Wikipedia and WebMD told me it was benign. I knew the odds were in my favor, but to be completely honestly, I felt there was a fragment of a chance I was about to die, or at least be told that that was in the cards.

I've been in the US for two weeks and I've been on edge the whole time.

I sat down with my American doctor and explained my symptoms. He recommended a neurologist. I went to him and waited to hear my fate. He called me into his exam room and looked at my medical report, which was written completely in Portuguese. I tried to help him translate it. Not my specialty.

"Let me see the CT scan," he said.

The doctor loaded the disk onto his computer and scanned through the 30 or so images. I knew where the cyst was in the presentation. I watched it come and go on his screen. He scrolled through the pictures a second time and again missed it.

"Where is this thing?" he asked.

I took his mouse and stopped on the slide near the middle of the deck. "Here," I said.

He looked closely, flipped back a few images and then rolled forward a few more, stopping on it each time.

"This looks like an artifact," he said.

I asked him what that meant. Was there a historically important document in my brain that I was unaware of? He said no. An artifact is essentially an error in the film. Perhaps I was moving during a brief instance of the photo's taking. Maybe some fluid in my head was moving.

I blinked and then circled back on the issue. "Okay," I said, "But what if it is a cyst? How might this affect my life?"

He said there's no way to know until there are symptoms. "But," he added," I don't think you have a cyst."

A minute later, I was shaking his hand and walking out of there making a lame joke about hoping "I don't have to see you again. Ha!" We talked more about the numbness first--a symptom, he explained, that's impossible to link to a specific cause. It could be a number of things from stress to inflammation of a nerve and unless I feel something new happen, I shouldn't worry.

I guess I'm not completely done with this issue. I'll still see another neurologist if I can. I don't blame the Brazilian doctors for getting things wrong. I was one patient in a revolving emergency room door that night. I was right that they were wrong. Luckily, it was in my favor and not something deadly serious.

I'm honestly just relieved. The thought of something foreign stretching its dark legs inside my brain was unnerving. Turns out, ironically, it was all in my head.

Preparing for the CT scan. I thought we would laugh about this later. Little did I know my "cyst" was about to make its debut.