I’ve always been a healthy guy. Sure I’ve eaten more pizza slices in my life than spinach leaves, and I’ll never win the gym’s perfect attendance award, but serious health issues? That’s just not me, you must be thinking of someone else. One time, I even said to my mom, “I feel like bad things just don’t happen to me. I have this faith that things are going to work out because they always have for me.”
Then Life came around and fixed my wagon. I’ve been sick — and more or less bedridden — for three weeks now. It’s a wild time! I’ve been reading lots of comic books! Discovering new music! Overcoming flashes of anxiety that I’ll be like this forever! Catching up on those emails!
One thing I’ve learned through this saga is that my health issues don’t make for a really gripping story so I’ll keep my diagnosis brief. A doctor stuck a needle in my back to extract my cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the stuff your brain floats in, to test if I had meningitis. I kept dribbling out the stuff after the procedure. Turns out the brain is extremely picky about its CSF levels, and my slight imbalance causes vomit-inducing headaches when I stand or sit up. My tolerance has improved over time though. The first week I threw up after 20 minutes of sitting and standing, but yesterday, it took me two hours and an Econ exam to make me feel nauseous.
I’ll tell you — a leaking spine really changes the game. The bus and all its stops became my personal odyssey. I can’t help envying the bored people around me tolerating the bus ride like normal humans, the kind that doesn’t leak spinal fluid. I remember when I was one of them. It was nice. I’ve charted a mental map of places on Grounds I can inconspicuously lay down, like the Newcomb basement, nooks in Nau and the underappreciated Wilson lounge. My thoughts have been grounded to simpler concerns, like I’ve been demoted on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. During my exam yesterday, my thoughts devolved from “How do I compute this?” to “Am I going to puke on this?” I ended up not puking on my test sheet, but I don’t think my answers were much more appealing.
All in all, I’m doing alright though — lots of time to think. This whole episode really reminded me how fragile my little world is. So many things have to be going just right for me to even begin worrying about finals, or the job hunt or the other things I spend my day thinking about. It’s really easy for me to get caught up in the University’s culture of achievement, but one little procedure made me forget all that and just imagine how amazing it would be to not have a headache.
I’m looking forward to being stressed out next semester and being able to tell myself, “at least my brain doesn’t feel like it’s inside a microwave instead of my skull” or, “at least I can breathe through my nose.” It really puts things in perspective. I had to make a tactical retreat out of one of my lectures because of my headaches, and the professor’s voice I usually pay so much attention to faded into the background. I opened the door out of Monroe and thought, “Oh yeah, the whole world is still out here while I’m usually in class.” I’m a pretty small piece of it, and a pretty lucky one. I get to worry about things like employment and grades because a lot of things are going right in my life already. Like my legs work. Eventually my spine will stop leaking. I have parents and a sister who support me. All of this makes my exams feel smaller than I’ve seen them in the past.
I’m really excited to stand up without being in pain again. I never considered this before, but standing is freaking amazing. Like, wow. What a concept.
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