Best Friend Brain

Several years ago, when I was in the middle of getting my cervical stenosis diagnosis, my neurosurgeon accidentally showed me my brain.

Several years ago, when I was in the middle of getting my cervical stenosis diagnosis, my neurosurgeon accidentally showed me my brain. I knew it was an accident immediately because he said, “whoops” — a word you never want to hear coming out of any doctor’s mouth — and tried to get the MRI image off the screen real quick. But it was too late! I’d seen it! “Is that my brain?” I asked, scooting as close to the monitor as I could get without pressing my nose to it. “My very own brain?”

He grimaced and said yes. He told me not to panic. He said most people panic when they see their own brains. He said there was nothing to worry about. It was a good and fine brain. The problem was my spinal column was crushing the nerves that control the upper left side of my body. We just needed to put some titanium into my spine, no big deal. Spread out the vertebrae. Release the nerves. Build back up the strength in my hand, shoulder, tricep, bicep, deltoid so I could grip stuff again and lift my arm over my head. But my brain, he said, was unremarkable.

I laughed! “Unremarkable?” I said. “My brain? My whole life is in there! All the greatest things that ever happened to me! The best things I’ve ever done! Everyone I ever loved and who ever loved me! The technique for shooting the most beautiful jump shot. BEEF, you know? Balance, Eyes, Elbow, Follow Through. Recipes for cooking actual beef, ideas for stories I’m gonna write, all the cats and dogs of my entire life! The bad stuff too, the hurt feelings, the crying that puffs up your whole face and swells your eyeballs shut. Instructions for how to survive a bear encounter! Brown, lay down. Black, fight back. White, good night (because you’re dead; with polar bears you’re for sure dead). It’s my brain! All the things that make me me are in there!”

I could tell my neurosurgeon was endlessly fascinated with me, and never more so than in that moment. He also explained for about the tenth time that “unremarkable” in a medical context simply means we don’t need to mess with it. It’s fine.

“You really are so weird,” he said fondly. We’d known each other a while by then; he’d seen all the infrastructure of my entire body.

“I am,” I agreed. “And you know where all the lived experiences that make me this weird are stored?”

He shook his head and gently rolled his eyes. “Your brain?”

I pointed at the screen where my brain was still on display. “My brain!”

I wasn’t always my own brain’s biggest fan. In fact, I spent a lot of years yelling at it. “Hush!” “Be quiet!” “Shut up!” “Stop!” “Stop replaying that!” “Stop thinking about that!” “Stop rehearsing that!” “Go to sleep!” “Please, go to sleep!” “Go! To! Sleep!” “Pipe down!” “Shush it!” “Quit chattering!” “Shuuuut upppppp!”

And then my very best therapist helped me see that my brain wasn’t my enemy. In fact, my brain was like my lifelong very well-meaning but slightly overbearing best friend. My brain was just protective, she said. My brain wanted to keep me safe. It remembered all the stuff that happened to me that hurt me, and all the ways those hurts manifested to create a web of even deeper pain, and it wanted to keep that from happening to me again. And so, sure, sometimes it screamed “TIGER ATTACK IMMINENT!” when actually it was just a text message from my boss, but that’s because it was getting the rest of my body on alert to keep me safe.

The thing is, threats of pain really are everywhere. Cars blitzing through red lights without a second look at the crosswalk. Electrical appliances glitching and starting fires. All the various toxins in household cleaning supplies. Climbing ladders, handling power tools, bubble baths, the literal sun. The world is constantly rippling (it’s “wriggly,” Alan Watts said) and we’re just trying to surf the ripples as safely and as ethically as we can. It’s your brain’s job to identify and alert you to big wriggles coming your way. And it’s your brain’s solemn duty to identify the wriggles that have caused you the most harm in the past — or things that remind it of those wriggles — to make you extra-alert about them.

I had to learn to work with my brain to understand the difference between real threats and plastic spiders. I had to work with my brain to help it understand that we’re mostly safe now, safer than ever, and we don’t have to be constantly on guard, and we also don’t have to be afraid of being afraid.

It’s a very long, very slow dance that me and my brain will be doing for the rest of my life, but wow, my relationship with my own noggin is the most iconic enemies to lovers story I’ve ever even heard of.

When I was getting ready to go in for my multi-level anterior cervical discectomy and fusion surgery (C5, C6, C7) my neurosurgeon stopped by the pre-op room to make sure I was feeling okay. It was a major, long, scary surgery, but he was the best surgeon in all of New York City for the job. I was feeling nervous, but also hopeful. I was so exhausted from being in perpetual pain and so devastated from dropping everything I tried to pick up with my left hand. I could hardly type anymore and typing is writing and writing is my life.

“If you see my brain while you’re in there—”

“I absolutely will not being seeing your brain,” he said.

“But if you do—”

“Heather,” he said, “something would have to go catastrophically wrong for me to see your actual brain during this surgery. Like a helicopter coming through the roof of the operating room.”

“You ever seen Grey’s Anatomy?”

He said, “No.”

I said, “Your loss.”

“Okay,” he said, finally. “If I see your brain?”

I reached out for him and he reached back. I squeezed his billion-dollar neurosurgeon hand in my calloused soft butch one and said, “Tell her I love her.”