They don't call you to the office...

Chapter 1

You know, one thing that I have learned in my 20 years of life is that they don’t call you to the principal’s office to tell you that you are doing a great job. That thought kept running through my head as I sat in the waiting room with my parents. I had suspected that something was wrong, because it is not normal to lose all your peripheral vision, and most people don't just start having double vision unless some form of recreational substance is involved, but I thought at the most I would just have to have a shunt revision. Which isn’t really all that big of a deal, mostly an inconvenience.

Because of the double vision and the other strange stuff, my eye doctor had sent me for a MRI, just to be sure that it wasn’t a shunt problem. The MRI was on Monday. Tuesday afternoon, we got a call from my neurologist telling us that we needed to come to the office to get the results of the scan. So, that brings us to Wednesday, sitting in the waiting room, thumbing through a magazine I couldn't see and pretending like I wasn’t scared to death. My mom and dad came with, and they were both trying to pretend like they weren’t worried sick about what was going on. We must have waited there for an hour or more, since we didn’t really have a scheduled appointment. Finally, the moment of truth came: “Miss Woody? The doctor will see you now! Please follow me!” (Have you ever noticed how receptionists in a doctor’s office are invariably disgustingly happy?)

We went into the exam room, and the nurse told me to change into the hospital gown on the table. You know, those wonderfully stylish ones that leave you mooning the world? She asked my parents to wait out in the hall, and told them that the doctor would speak to them. Now by this time, those teeny-weeny butterflies that I had been doing my best to ignore had grown into a horde of angry bees buzzing around in my stomach. So, I obeyed the nurse’s instructions.

My parents went into the hall, and just as I had finished changing, I hear my mother. “But that fills up almost the whole third ventricle!” Leave it to mom to try to give me a head’s up about what the whole deal was over. It worked. I started sobbing, because I knew that it was not going to be good. By the time the doctor came back in, I had myself under control, and was able to take the news pretty well. With a solemn expression, Dr. Artimis gave me the news.

“Beth, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but you have a brain tumor. We don’t know what kind, and we don’t know if we can even get to it to remove it. At this point it time, we are just looking at our options.”

After dropping his bombshell, Dr. Artimis took me in the hall, and did a bunch of tests on me, checking out my walking, reflexes, that kind of thing. You know, the last time I almost fell on my butt standing up, there was alcohol involved, but during those test I did it four times in five minutes. After he was done with all the tests, I thought I would get to go home, but it turns out the place you go when they are trying to figure out what to do with you is the hospital, so I was admitted from the office. Thankfully it was the hospital that my mom worked at, so I was more comfortable there. Two hours later, I was comfortably-sort of-ensconced in my hospital bed, ready for sleep, right? Wrong. I didn’t get to sleep till almost 2 in the morning that night. Tests, scans, blood work, more needle sticks, the whole workup. Plus the added thrill of having no idea of what was going to happen to me. But the biggest ordeal was going to happen the next morning. (At least from my point of view.)

On Saturday, three days before my diagnosis and admission, I had met a guy in Kansas City that I had known for years, and had a crush on for just as long. I had met him on my grandparents farm when I was about 13. He had never really acted like he liked me back, so nothing really came of it, until about March (a month ago.) He called me at my parent’s house on a Friday night, out of nowhere, after not seeing him or talking to him for three years. After a few weeks of phone calls, we made plans to meet for a date in Kansas City. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. On that Saturday, we met at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park. We walked around the mall, just talking and catching up on the last few years, then we went to dinner and out to a movie. It was a wonderful date. At the end of the date, he asked me to be his girlfriend. Of course I said yes.

Fast-forward to three days later, me sitting in a hospital bed not really sure what the phone call I had to make was going to bring. I had to leave him a message to call me back, and when he did, I had to tell him that his new girlfriend was in the hospital with a brain tumor, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. I truly was bowled over by his response. “Well, it will all work out, and don’t worry, I am not going anywhere.” It takes a special kind of guy to stick with a girl he barely knows after a bombshell like that.

After another fun day of not knowing what was going to happen, I had a surprise visitor. Chad came to see me, drove two hours after he got off work just to sit and hold my hand till I fell asleep. As I was getting ready to fall asleep, we had a very romantic conversation. He was sitting there, holding my hand like it was a lifeline. “Sweetie, you look scared to death!” “I am,” he said. “I feel like just when I found you I am gonna lose you!” Well, since that was about the sweetest thing I had ever heard, I couldn’t help almost crying. I did cry a few minutes later, when he told me that he loved me.