By Susan Tweit
November 2009
It’s official: my husband, Richard, is missing a marble. Or at least a marble-sized tumor.
A week and a half ago, his neurosurgery team removed a purple tumor the size of a large marble from the right temporal lobe of his brain. They reported that they’d gotten the whole thing, it stayed intact, and that it was small and well-defined.
“Small?” I asked the neurosurgeon. “It could have been much larger,” she replied. I’m glad I didn’t know that beforehand.
The surgery left him with an eight-inch-long, sinuous incision decorating the right side of his head, held together with 24 shiny stainless-steel staples. Underneath that head jewelry is a suture in his temporalis muscle (the long one running down the side of your skull to attach your jaw), a 2.5-inch-diameter hole in the skull itself, now patched with titanium plates and screws, another suture in the membrane covering his brain, and a marble-sized gouge in the aforementioned brain.
We’re fortunate though; removing the tumor didn’t disturb any of the other marbles, the healthy brain tissue he needs to walk, talk, and pass the most advanced neurological tests–multiple times, with gracious patience.
There’s an irony in his surgeon’s description of the tumor as purple and the size of a large marble. Richard’s most recent outdoor sculpture is studded with small, round, colored globes of glass–yes, marbles.
(The sculpture, which is called “Matriculation,” is on display at Salida’s SteamPlant Sculpture Park, as part of an ongoing show of regional sculptors’ work.)
Now Richard is healing, a process helped greatly by being at home. Four days after an overnight stay in the ICU, he was recuperating in his favorite chair in our sunlit living room.
And we’re waiting for news on his tumor. We still haven’t heard the pathology results, which of course, we hope will be summed up in a simple and powerful: “benign.”
Waiting is hard, especially for news that has the potential to change the course of your life. There’s also a grace to it.
Waiting forces a sort of suspension of time and of the oh-so-determined purposefulness we often think life requires.
It’s a pause in our driven busyness, a hush in our chatter, a time in which we can listen within to the softer, quieter voice that often speaks for our true self, the self unencumbered by shoulds and woulds and what-ifs.
When we engage in the waiting mindfully–with awareness of how it is for us–and don’t push it aside, waiting allows the opportunity to just be. To breathe, literally and metaphorically.
To practice life pared to the basics; to learn what the basics are. To perceive what we hear and feel and are, without filters.
Patience will never be one of my virtues. But as I practice waiting and listening, I realize that for the things that matter, I can be patient, at least for a time.
And it’s worth the effort for the guy who is missing a purple marble–one we won’t go looking for anytime soon.
Copyright 2009 Susan J. Tweit. Originally published in the Salida Mountain Mail.
Award-winning writer Susan J. Tweit is the author of 12 books, and can be contacted through her web site, susanjtweit.com or her blog, susanjtweit.typepad.com/walkingnaturehome
