The echoes of my past, that reverberate in my head. Blank spaces filled with nothing more than vague thoughts when I'm lucky, or unlucky if the case may be. Yet another person, who I almost recall. And yet again, what I remember doesn't match. And as they wish, I won't approach again, won't disturb their life, because I have no idea what harm I might have done. My vague memories weren't negative ones, but it would appear those aren't the dominant ones. Nothing new there, right?
But it never stops hurting. Did I do anything at all when I was younger that marked me as anything else but damaged? Did I truly wreak so much havoc and destruction that there is nothing and no one who can remember anything else of me? Because I'm beginning to believe that might actually be the case, that there are no redeeming qualities about me at all. And perhaps being who I am now isn't enough to make up for whatever it is that I did then, to make me so universally despised.
And you know what? Now we're going to take a little stroll down some reading that most of you won't even bother looking at past this point. And that's fine. It's mostly for me, anyway. You might learn something about me, if you do. Something about who I am, and what I've been through, and how I came to be me, now, today. Hell, my parents might even learn something educational on this little stroll. No, I'm not making excuses for the fact that I was a colossal asshole when I was younger, because I was. This has nothing to do with that. But I am very nearly thirty-two years old. And getting judged for things I did when I was seventeen, eighteen, or younger, is starting to get old. Things I did half a lifetime ago, during a time period when I was apparently *literally* not me.
Observe. For those of us joining the party right now, hello there, I'm Controversy, and I'm a cancer survivor. I had a malignant oligoastrocytoma, grade 4, which is usually terminal. I was incredibly lucky. On April 5, 2009, I will be moved into the "survivor" category, meaning I have achieved 5 years without recurrence of the tumor.
And while I was lucky, and I'm alive, I lost many things when they took the tumor out. Some of them were good. But among those things, were a lot of my memory. Again, observe: This is how the brain looks. In my case, my tumor was the size of a golf ball, or very near. It was 3.9 cm. A golf ball is 4.2 cm. If you've ever seen one, while they're not huge, to hold in your hand? Imagine that, inside of your brain. And my tumor was between the temporal and parietal lobes. If you put a golf ball in between those two lobes, as the link shows you of your brain? It will push on *damn near everything*. When your frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and parietal lobe all become impacted, and then two of the three have a very large section removed entirely, you end up with this: Before the tumor is taken out, while everything is still shoved every-which-way to try to accommodate the extra mass inside of the skull itself, you have blinding migraines.
You ever think you have a headache? Rest assured, you have nothing once you put an extra golf ball or so, inside your skull, along with the pulsing, pounding blood coursing up there, making everything want to black out, and scream in agony. Twenty-four-hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. And there is nowhere for the pressure to be released. It simply is blinding pain, and no amount of narcotics, or migraine medication, or anti-inflammatory made can help take down the swelling of a brain tumor, inside of your skull. And that much pain, constant pain, will make almost anyone unstable.
But that actually isn't even the biggest problem. The major difficulty is that the extra mass pushes on actual functional brain tissue, which is designed to be doing other things, and is, in fact, causing various extra things to take place. Across the spectrum, because of that extra compression, and as the tumor grows, it will cause an entire range of responses.
The extra pressure on the frontal lobe can result in a variety of things, including lack of facial expression, difficulty speaking, thinking, aberrant sexual behavior are all among the problems.
Extra pressure on the temporal lobe can result in verbal, auditory language and speech problems, perception problems, trouble with sexual behavior, personality and affective issues. Now, if you're also having seizures that effect your temporal lobes, you can also throw in there, serious aggressive rages, paranoia and perseverative speech difficulties. The temporal lobes are the ones that are highly associated with memory as well. Just to add to all the fun.
And now we're at the parietal lobe, which controls the ability to recognize the world around you.
That was actually pretty simplified, and now I'm going to do the whole step-by-step tedious thing here, on "what happens when you *take the tumor out*". Because that's an entire different ball of wax, to be honest. It was enough of a pain in the ass for me, and my life, with the extra golf ball up there, as it made me unpredictable, in pain, and unable to recall things, among other refinements. Gods help the poor people who actually came into contact with me, depending on whether or not I was "Good Controversy" or "Bad Controversy" on any given day, hour, minute, second of whichever given day. Because I evidently did indeed change personalities the way 'normal' (and I grant that normal is somewhat variable) people take breaths of oxygen.
We've established that I had an oligoastrocytoma, it was *between* my left temporal and parietal lobes. What that means, in plain English, is that when they took it out, damage to the left parietal lobe specifically causes several things, in my case I got 'speech aphasia', trouble writing things down, known as transference, and some trouble with math. I also got damage to the section in between the temporal-parietal lobe that causes memory damage, in my case a lot of long-term memory is gone, and my ability to retain what I learn has been impaired. That aspect of what's considered 'short-term' memory has been altered, although with repetition I can encode it differently than I used to. My basic personality may or may not have altered, but the only persons who can say that with confidence aren't me. Because *I* don't remember. My left temporal damage was affected by the removal verbally in so much as I retain information better if it's written down, than I do if I hear it now. My speech was affected, and when I'm upset, my aphasia is terrible, as a direct result of the removal. As for the frontal lobe the most extensive damage that occurred to me there, after the tumor removal, was to my memory. A brain surgery is considered a "traumatic brain injury", and the effects of TBI on all lobes are variable. In my case, my memory has never recovered. Sometimes, seeing faces, talking to people, will occasionally make an association. It's rare, but it happens. But that's the biggest thing that's been long-lasting from the TBI that happened to my frontal lobe, the part that was most damaged from the tumor itself. The others were a physical removal, when they did the resection, but the frontal lobe damage was from the pressure, and what was shoved out of place from the extra mass inside my skull, and it has never recovered. There is no expectation that it will be any better than it is today.
I have to cope with that. And I'm aware that it's hard to believe, that it would be easier to doubt me. I was a fucked-up teenager. I was apparently a completely shitty person. Out of control, a total ass. How much of that was simply my personality, and how much of it was because my personality was influenced by the impulse centers in my brain having a golf ball pushing on them, I'll never actually know. And it doesn't honestly matter anymore. I'm almost thirty-two years old. I haven't been a teenager for twelve years. Anyone who actually *knows* me, today? And still doesn't quite believe the story of my demented little trip down brain-surgery-alley, I suppose I can show you the disgusting photos we took right after the resection, with my head half shaved, and stapled together to keep my gorgeous titanium skull from gleaming in the sunshine. The puncture wounds from the IV that kept me alive while they put a saw into my head and lifted off half my skull, which they never bothered putting back, because the recurrence rate on my tumor is so high, they know that chances are they'll need to go back in at some point, to try and take more out. It was easier to just need to unscrew the plate they put on, than to need to saw my skull back off again.
*This* is my life, and these are the realities that I face, every single day. What I can't remember, and who I was are difficult for me to swallow, much less stomach, being that I have trouble putting the person that I *am* in context with the person people tell me that I was. And oh, yes, I accept it. And I apologize for it. I have apologized until I am blue in the face. But it hurts, over and over and over. How long am I supposed to pay, for a crime I cannot remember committing, and to whom do I apologize, when I look at you, and don't actively recall wounding you?
This is me. I have the proof on my scalp, inside of me. What more is there?
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