Neither Here Nor There

  I have a benign brain tumor which is called an acoustic neuroma, or vestibular schwannoma if you want to be fancy. It's a rare tumor.   One person in 100,000 will be diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma in any given year.   Picture the biggest college football stadium in the US.   See all those people?   Just will be the unlucky one diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma. It was 2010 when I was diagnosed and I was thirty-three years old.  I had been so sick - incredibly fatigued, lightheaded with painful headaches and pressure in my head - that I was happy to have found a reason for my suffering.  The only problem is that while we found something that definitely needed treatment, the tumor was not making me sick.  Then neurosurgeons told me that my symptoms were not caused by the acoustic neuroma.  They said the only symptoms usually caused by an acoustic neuroma are loss of hearing and dizziness.  Wanting to believe that we had discover...

Sometime during the summer of 2010, I started feeling lightheaded when I would stand up.  I told my doctor that when I stood up, I felt like all the blood in my body rushed to my head and I heard a "whooshing" in my ears and felt like I was going to pass out.  I was getting migraines for the first time in my life and had extreme fatigue.  My doctor gave me a prescription for an MRI along with a referral to a neurologist. I scheduled my MRI for an evening so that I wouldn't miss work.  I was working full-time as an attorney and my three children were all under the age of 5 years old.  When I checked in for the MRI, the technician told me that because of the late hour she couldn't give me a CD of the results.  But when the test was done she did give me a CD, which should have been my first clue that something was wrong. By the time I got home, my phone was ringing.  It was the physician on-call for my primary care practice, whom I did not know.  I r...