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free-range chicken."
She just stared back at me, and said, "What can you eat?"
It was a teaching hospital, not a catering service, I realized. But my mother was furious. She
stood up, all 5-foot-3 of her, and said, "We're getting ready to face brain surgery tomorrow, and
don't even try this with me. We have a nutritionist who has recommended certain things. If you
can't do it, fine. We'll get our own food." From then on, whenever my mother visited the
hospital she went shopping for me.
Next, we went to our room, and my mother decided it was too noisy. It was right by the nurses'
station, and she thought it would disturb me to hear them talking outside my door, so she
insisted that they change my room, and I was moved to the end of the hall, where it was
quieter.
That afternoon, I saw Dr. Shapiro for the preliminaries to surgery.
One charming feature of frameless stereotactics entailed placing colored dots all over my skull to
mark the locations of the tumors and the places where Shapiro would make his incisions to get
to them.
Somehow, those dots made the surgery more immediate. It struck me that they put those dots
on my head so that Shapiro would know where to cut into my skull. There was no easy way to
say it; it was where the surgeon would crack my head open.
"LaTrice," I said, "the idea of cutting my head open, I just don't know if I can deal with that."
I met a wall. Much as I wanted to be positive and unafraid, all I knew was, when people get
brain tumors, they don't live. The rest I figured was curable; my other organs and appendages
weren't as important. But the brain, that was the big one. I remembered a rhyme I'd heard
somewhere, "Once you touch the brain you're never the same." The people around me were as
frightened as I was, or more so. It seemed everyone I knew had flown in to be with me: Och,
Chris Carmichael, Bill, Kevin. I wanted them around, and I knew they were glad to be there,
because it made them feel like they could do something to help. But I could see the fear in their
faces, in their widened eyes and their false cheerfulness, so I tried to rally, and to hide my own
uncertainty.
"I'm ready to crush this thing," I announced. "I'm ready for this surgery. You won't find me
sitting around trembling, scared to let them take me."
One thing you realize when you're sick is that you aren't the only person who needs
support sometimes you have to be the one who supports others. My friends shouldn't always
have to be the ones saying: "You're going to make it." Sometimes I had to be the one who
reassured them, and said, "I'm going to make it. Don't worry."
We watched the World Series and tried to act like we were interested in the outcome as much
as anybody really cares about baseball before brain surgery. We chatted about the stock market,
and about bicycle racing. The e-mails and cards kept pouring in, from people I didn't even know
or hadn't heard from in years, and we sat around reading them aloud.
I felt a sudden urgency to assess my financial worth. I explained the health-insurance problem to
Och and Chris, and we got paper and pencils and began totaling up my assets. "Let's see where I
am," I said. "We've got to get this wired tight. I need to have a plan, so I can feel like I'm
controlling this thing." I had enough saved up to go to college, we decided if I sold my house. I
didn't want to sell it, but I tried to be philosophical. Hey, I got dealt a bad hand. If I needed the
money, that's what I would have to do. I added up my cash, and how much was in my
retirement account.
Lot: $220,000. Pool and landscaping: $60,000. Furniture and art: $300,000. Fixtures:
$50,000.
Later in the day, Shapiro came to my room. "We need to discuss the surgery," he said in a
serious tone.
"What are you talking about?" I said. "This is relatively minor, right?"
"Well, it's a little more serious than that."
Shapiro said that the tumors were in two tricky spots: one was over my vision field and the
other was over a center of coordination. So that explained my blurry vision. He said he would
tailor the operation to be precise, keeping the incisions as small as possible, hopefully making
them within one millimeter of the lesions. There would be no huge incisions like in the old days.
Still, I shuddered at his description of the procedure. I don't think I had fully admitted the
severity of the operation to myself; I thought it sounded easy he would just go in and scrape off
the lesions. But now that he went into the details, it hit home that he would be operating in
areas where the slightest errors could cost me my eyesight or my movement and motor skills.
Shapiro could see that I was beginning to get truly frightened. "Look, nobody ever wants brain
surgery," he said. "If you aren't scared, you aren't normal."
Shapiro assured me that I would bounce back from the surgery quickly: I would spend just one
day in intensive care and, after another day of recovery, I would get straight down to business
with my chemotherapy.
That night, my mother, Bill, Och, Chris, and the rest of the group took me across the street to
the mall to get something to eat at a nice continental-cuisine restaurant. I couldn't eat much. I
still had the dots on my head from the frameless stereotactics, and a hospital bracelet on my
wrist, but I no longer cared how I looked. So what if I had dots on my head? I was just happy to
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