Close encounters

After coming so close to death, everything comes into question.

I realized that I had a ticking time bomb in my head and that if it had not been for the angelic messengers that day that the aneurysm would have turned deadly. I was told I had less than a 20% chance of making it if it had burst. I was also told that there were a lot of dicey moments during the procedure because I started bleeding and they couldn't stop it. The Plavix they had me on caused a nose bleed - wouldn't that be something to die from a nosebleed with a huge aneurysm in my head?

In the ICU after the procedure, I kept waking up from a chemical sleep vomiting blood from all that I swallowed. The nurses kept having to bathe me and shampoo my hair because I looked like poor Carrie after they dumped pig blood on her at the prom.

The recovery has been tough. The doctor said that I'd have substantial pain for quite a while until the aneurysm scarred over because of all the platinum coils they planted in there. Boy was he right. I've lost all the hair on the left-side of my head from all the radiation they zapped me with to check whether each of the 30-something coils was planted right. Doctor did not like to prescribe pain medicine for pain - and all I could do for 6 weeks was lay on the sofa with my eyes covered and pray for relief. Since the aneurysm was pressing on the optic nerves at the place where they cross over, vision affected. Psychedelic flotsam floating in front of faces, pages, words are out of focus, things go hazy and white like after being out in the snow on a sunny day.

All that being said, I was on the happy side of the grass. I realized that I SHOULD be happy. But there were a lot of days I was depressed, down and unable to understand why because I knew I was given a gift.

I had not read about the procedure, which is odd because I love doing medical research. I couldn't stand even the thought of reading about it - this is your brain and this is your brain with an aneurysm and this is your brain with an aneurysm shoved full of metal coils. I hadn't even read about the side-effects of the drugs they have me on. Part of the depression, part of facing my own mortality?

I finally looked at the booklet they sent me home with "Understanding Your Aneurysm," chock-full of cartoon figures before and after brain surgery trying to eat breakfast, watch TV, walk and talk. It says that emotional lability and depression are common after brain surgery. Then had the courage to look up the medications. I found that two drugs I'm on don't play well together. Good grief. Really do have to be our own advocates, don't we?

Boiled down, I've been in a funk, had a lot of pain, and vision has been impaired and it feels like two months of my life were gutted. But things are getting better. Pain level is way down and vision has steadily improved. Hair is still missing. I twisted my ankle on the stairs the other day and went down - caught myself so that head was protected from the concrete at the bottom. Bad sprain, foot swelled like a balloon. They say there are no real accidents - so I wonder what I was trying to accomplish with recovery from aneurysm so fresh.

The point of all of this is that I have been questioning everything. Why was I spared? I definitely was spared. Why? There must be a reason, there must be something that I am to do, there must be a purpose. What is it? It can't be sitting in my house typing video documentaries day after day, can it? There must be something else. God sent those angels for a reason, there is always a reason. I fall asleep weighing, examining, I awaken weighing, examining and asking for guidance.

Memories flood day and night. Some are sweet, like laundry off a springtime clothes line. Others are dark, dank. All haunt and have me at the edge of a precipice of awe and confusion.

What do You Say to an Angel?

What would you do if you saw an angel? Would you blink your eyes, rub them, reach for the Visine, look away and then continue on with what you were doing before you saw what you thought you saw? That's what I did that day in March when they saved my life. I was so stubbornly busy and full of frustration that I couldn't type through the pile of rush projects in front of me fast enough that I kept closing my eyes to what was right in front of them.

I must be very tired and stressed - it was as simple as that - and the angels were pushed to the side. But they kept coming back and they had my dad in tow with them. My dad died October 9 when a massive brain bleed hit him hard and took him fast. Whoosh - here one minute, gone the next. There was no feeling that Dad was watching over us or that his spirit was around. Nope. It was as if he was erased except for in our memories.

So, there they were - Dad and a few angels and one angel's name that hung in the air was Raphael. No, they weren't sitting on the sofa across from me and I didn't feel that I needed to offer them Southern sweet tea and a snack. It wasn't like that. They were in my head, my mind's eye and they had all their attention focused on me. Dad would look at me and then them as if to say, "See what I mean?" I'd get up, stretch, get a drink, look out the window, rub my eyes, wipe away runaway tears - I missed my dad! He looked like an angel that day - he was young and beautifully handsome, blonde, tall, strong and the gray hair and few wrinkles he had when he died were gone - but it was still my dad, I recognized his spirit, his love, and he looked like Dad when he was young man. Maybe I was working too much.

The only symptom that day was that all letters on the screen had a ghost image underneath them and there were times when everything went out of focus. A couple of times in the past month, my vision was crystal clear without my glasses on. Those clear-sighted periods were brief and chalked up to wow, that's weird. On March 10 when the angels and my dad showed up, I couldn't understand why they were giving me the message to "GO" for help. That was it. It was loud and clear and there were no words spoken. Each time they came, I felt pushed to "Go." They spoke without saying a word.

At 4 p.m., I finally said "Okay!" out loud and stopped working and got cleaned up, drove to urgent care where my vision was checked. I felt silly and explained that perhaps it was fatigue, high blood pressure, family history of cataracts, my dear Aunt Blanche had macular degeneration ... I was apologetic for taking up space in the urgent care office.

Vision checked out fine, BP was a little high. They sent me to the ER where I waited for hours to be seen. At 11 that evening, the doctor said I should have an MRI. Fortified with Valium, off I went to the magic ticking picture tube. After the test, I was out in the hall resting on the gurney and heard the techs whispering - "Did you see that?"

The ER doctor very softly and kindly said, "You have a cerebral aneurysm." I was admitted so that I could have an angiogram the next day where they would use a camera fished up through my groin through the carotid arteries to scope out the aneurysm. I was sent home on Plavix and baby aspirin for a week and then went back to have a procedure where the aneurysm was stented, platinum wires were put in the aneurysm and Dr. Fredieu sealed up the opening to the aneurysm to decrease the blood flow so that it would die off over time.

The procedure lasted over six hours because the aneurysm was "huge" and was bigger than what showed on the MRI or the angiogram. The night after the procedure in the ICU, I was heavily sedated but kept waking up throwing up blood - lots and lots of blood. The nurses kept having to bathe me and wash my hair. The anesthesiologist came by the next morning and said he wanted to see with his own eyes that I was okay because I had given them some scares because my nose started bleeding and there was a lot of blood loss.

The doctors were all amazed that I went for help when I did since I wasn't having any pain. They said the aneurysm was probably congenital and that it had gotten bigger over the years and accounted for the cluster migraines I had been diagnosed with. The aneurysm was pressing on the spot in the brain where the optic nerves cross and that accounted for the weird visual problems and the pain around and behind my eye with the headaches. I was told that at the very least I was saved from blindness, and that more than likely, my life was spared. It would have burst eventually and they said I would have had less than a 20% chance of surviving.

There's more to the story and stories on stories but I wanted to get this posted.

So. What do you say to angels? I say "Thank you."