I have a tumor inside my head. It’s not very big. It sits on the outer part of the brain itself, just to the left of center. It has a rhythmic, tongue-twisting name: meningioma.

I don’t know how long it has been in there but perhaps for decades, a permanent resident. When the physician informed me about this, I was not at all surprised and maybe even a little relieved. Over the course of my life, I’ve had regular headaches that resisted diagnosis by multiple physicians of varying specialties. And being female, I was sometimes dismissed without either testing or serious attention. There was little, if any, conversation about them.

At about twenty-five, I began suffering from moderately severe headaches. I thought it was likely due to the amount of stress I was under, which was both acute and chronic. That decade of life is notoriously rife with changes in career and romance, and even residences, all part of my hectic life back then. My internist gave me a prescription for Fiorinal, which was the only drug that would knock it down. The unfortunate side-effect was that it KO’d me, too.

That same year, I was walking back to my car after my first day as a graduate student in a psychology program, feeling hopeful about a new career goal. I became aware only some time later that I had blacked out at the top of a long series of stairs leading down to the parking lot. Fortunately, I hadn’t fallen down that steep flight. The physician said he needed a pneumoencephalogram to determine if the blackout was caused by a brain tumor. A brain tumor? I prepared for the worst but couldn’t help thinking about Bette Davis in Dark Victory. At least my end would be a theatrical one. I’ve always had a dark sense of humor in such times, comforting if mordant.

The pneumoencephalogram involved my sitting on a table while a large needle was inserted near my spine, cerebrospinal fluid extracted and sent to a lab. I got a massive headache every time I moved my head, a common after effect.  It went on for a week. I spent hours on my back, waiting for a phone call with the results. When it came, the diagnosis was equivocal. No, it wasn’t a brain tumor at all. The doctor thought I “merely” had a case of encephalitis, a brain virus, but he couldn’t be certain.

Since early childhood, I have had a strong sense of my own mortality. I knew that many of my relatives on both sides had died or were about to die somewhere under the age of sixty. I hoped to make it to thirty. So, the possible diagnosis of the headaches and blackout being “merely” encephalitis was a good outcome from my vantage point. It seemed the symptoms might disappear in time, rather than it being a premonition of the family genetic curse. My Bette Davis scene would have to wait.

A few years and a few graduate degrees later, I was teaching psychology at a university. I had a less pedantic style than my colleagues, injecting humor and even song lyrics into my lectures, making it more fun for all of us. I had also started singing some evenings in jazz clubs, fulfilling a longstanding fantasy. It seemed much of the stress had abated and I was living a life of my choosing.

When I started to forget lyrics in the middle of songs and had disquieting word-finding problems during lectures, I attributed all this to the fatigue of packing too much into one life. I was sent to a neurologist who conducted a battery of tests. Apparently, I had an abnormal EEG and was likely suffering from a form of petit mal epilepsy, called “absences.” He put me on two medications that were supposed to help. For the most part, they did, and I discontinued them a couple of years later. Another diagnosis to add to the collection.

The headaches reappeared at unpredictable intervals and often lasted a year or longer. They were mostly low-level, and it became surprisingly easy to habituate to them. Every once in a while, there would be one that laid me flat, which my ophthalmologist said was likely an ophthalmic migraine. Nothing could be done, short of narcotics.

After some good financial planning and some propitious help from a burgeoning stock market, I closed down a busy clinical psychology practice at the age of fifty. My partner and I traveled extensively during those first few years and developed an amenable relationship with a local travel agent. One afternoon, after booking a cruise through northern Europe, we were about to leave her office when I found myself unable to formulate words. The nouns and verbs were clear in my head but what came out were sounds that did not resemble anything recognizable. I knew this to be a well-known sign of stroke, but I said nothing because I otherwise felt fine. Within a few minutes, as we were getting in the car, I was able to speak again. I looked in the car mirror for signs of droop or weakness on either side of my body. Everything seemed normal. I let it go. Again, stress, even if of the positive type, a momentary glitch.

Within a year or so, we had moved to a sunnier climate. It was a more relaxed time, a new life ahead. I had just signed a contract with a carpenter to construct bookcases in the dining room and was pleased with how the house was coming together. As the carpenter was leaving, I turned to my partner for a self-congratulatory conversation when, again, I couldn’t formulate what I wanted to say–-or say anything that resembled human speech. This time it was more obvious. I ran into the bathroom to take a look at my face. To my relief, everything looked to be OK.

But now I became concerned about what this might mean down the road. I have always prided myself on being a highly verbal person, an articulate communicator. For the first time, I saw a possible future ahead where I could no longer express myself well, if at all. What would that be like?

The neurologist in the new city did tests and, like the other, seemed unconcerned, almost patronizing. My research had told me there were clear indications that I had experienced two TIAs—transient ischemic attacks—within a year. But all he said was, “Take a children’s aspirin each morning. You’ll be fine.”

But those headaches continued. When they were life-interrupting, I assumed they were the ophthalmic migraines diagnosed earlier. When they were tolerable, they became a normal part of my day. On occasion, they made me short-fused and impatient, more than usual. I took my aspirin and lived with the symptoms.

Years went by until the next episode. I had noticed more difficulty with word finding and retrieval of information, which I attributed to aging. The health problems associated with that encroached, too—a couple of bouts with DCIS, a form of breast cancer, a diagnosis of osteoporosis, four joint replacements due to arthritis. That was just life, I thought. I had already, in my seventies, outlived the lifespan of almost all my relatives, going back three generations. Because of this, I had developed a carpe diem attitude about my life, avoiding postponement of pleasure when possible, while living a healthy and responsible life.

One Saturday, I went to a nursery to buy plants for the yard. As I was heading for the cash register, a woman towing a wagon full of greens cut me off and knocked me off my feet. I hit my head on the left side which subsequently caused the headaches to escalate. The internist ordered an MRI just to be sure I didn’t have a concussion.

The MRI showed that I had not one but two tumors growing on my brain, one on the pituitary and the other in the parietal lobe, the meningioma. He could not speculate whether they had been there for decades or were new residents. I asked the doc if anything could or should be done about them and he reassured me they were growing on the lining of the brain and were almost always benign. He didn’t think they were implicated in any of my previous problems, neither the TIAs nor the headaches. I told him that it seemed more than coincidental than the meningioma happened to be in the exact location where the worst of the headaches happened.

One afternoon a few weeks later, when I was relaxing at home, the familiar headache began and slowly climbed the pain scale. By dinner time, I had lost any interest in eating. Hours later, it was the worst headache I had ever experienced. I wondered if I might pass out or even die. I considered taking myself to the ER or calling 911. However, I now lived alone and had responsibility for an English bulldog puppy. I knew an ER visit would take at least 5–6 hours and, if it were serious, much longer. I decided to just wait it out, go to bed and see what happened in the morning. I turned to the dog, who was misbehaving, to tell her she would have to get in her crate for a while. I got half the sentence out then lost all words. The dog stared at me, sensing something was wrong. By now I was more than a little concerned. Even so, I went to bed and to sleep and by morning, everything was back to normal. The headache had decelerated from a 9 back to its familiar 2–3 level of pain.

I emailed my internist who set up an appointment with a different neurologist—not the one who patted me on the head and reiterated the instruction to take a daily aspirin. This one looked at the tests and confirmed my suspicion that the meningioma was sitting directly on the part of the brain that controls speech. It could explain the TIA-related lack of articulate speech and perhaps even the headaches. It might also account for the cognitive fuzziness now and again. Was there an answer here, at last? Perhaps, but there is no remedy but habituation. It’s benign and stable, an apparently permanent part of my brain habitat.

Last year, I was diagnosed with coronary artery disease, stenosis in all four coronary arteries. The state-of-the-art treatment is an elite $14,000-a-year drug. It’s supposed to lower the probability of a heart attack or stroke, stabilizing the plaque that has found a comfy home in my artery walls. The main side effect? Headaches.

 Pam Munter has authored several books, including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram and Almost Famous. She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer, and film historian. Her essays, book reviews, and short stories have appeared in more than 100 publications. She is the nonfiction book reviewer for Fourth and Sycamore. Her first play, Life Without, was nominated for Outstanding Original Writing by the Desert Theatre League and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her memoir, As Alone As I Want To Be, was published in 2018 by Adelaide Books.

Header image by Vinicius Amano via Unsplash