WHY SHOULD I CHOOSE ST. TERESA OF ÁVILA HOSPITAL FOR MY CRANIOTOMY?

The Department of Neurological Surgery at St. Teresa’s has been recognized for decades as one of the foremost specialty centers that focuses on the brain and spinal cord. Surgeons from all over the globe come to learn about the latest minimally invasive—and the latest maximally invasive—techniques. It’s deliberate that Saint Teresa of Ávila happens to be the patron saint for headache sufferers. Tales from hagiographies describe her mystical trances wherein she would feel herself be stabbed through the heart and out her intestines with the fiery golden lance of God, causing excruciating spiritual torment. Hospital halls are built for suffering. Teresa’s mantra was, “Lord, let me suffer or let me die.”

CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR SURGICAL TEAM?

Though I wouldn’t necessarily call us a team, I did fill in as pitcher so the hospital could participate in league softball playoffs. Dr. Jay Katz couldn’t make it because he had a Whipple. Jay is a terror both on and off the mound. He can remove half a patient’s pancreas without having to pee. I’d have to rig myself up with a catheter. Dr. Amy Benson is our go-to skull-base surgeon. She recently returned from maternity leave. Now the only thing we hear about is the coltish softness of fontanels, the magical myelination moment of development when her baby recognized—I mean really recognized—her face. Maybe I’m just jealous she has a child who recognizes her face. Dr. Chen, our primary pediatric specialist, decided to retrain from dermatology after his son died of an astrocytoma. I’m very sorry Dr. Chen’s son died of an astrocytoma, and I’m sorry that we’re compared to the example of heartbroken-but-nonetheless-resilient goodness set by Dr. Chen. Then there is Dr. Steve Stevens, who has a decent name for a nemesis; he is the director of neurosurgical operating rooms at St. Teresa of Ávila and once left a sponge behind in a patient’s brain. Do not permit a man with essentially the same first and last name to operate on your spine, his forte, the most lucrative specialization in our field.

As for me, I have a totaled Lexus, the academically indifferent sons, an acute condition of plantar fasciitis, a touch of alcoholism, and the no-longer-toilet-trained golden retriever. But you don’t really want to know this, do you? It’s like when you were a kid and you ran into your teacher parting the mist on some veggies in the grocery store and it dawned on you, “Wow, Mr. Wilson must have to move through linear time.”

YOU’RE KIND OF ANGRY, AND THAT’S NOT VERY PROFESSIONAL. IS EVERYTHING OKAY?

I feel betrayed by the brain. The brain is more or less the same in everyone; there is the Broca’s area, that cul-de-sac of speech in the arcuate fasciculus, and there is the hippocampus, that seahorse of memory, nestled in the temporal lobe. But when you think of the color red, do you picture the insistent primal red of an emergency vehicle or the deep burgundy of an aged wine? If I asked you to visualize a chair, would you picture an ornately carved dining chair or a plush recliner? Similarly, I thought my husband was predictable; I knew which entrée he would order at restaurants, which jokes would elicit a laugh. Then I found my husband in the garage after his suicide by gunshot to the head, and our relationship no longer made sense. I assumed I had known the locations and boundaries of things, where he tended to take off his shoes, the weekend afternoons he liked to be left alone. The older brother he used to idolize had overdosed. My husband was sad, and after a while I became exasperated with him, because I assumed that I understood where the edges of that sadness were. Now I wonder: When I am resecting a brain to prevent seizures, for example, what am I even attempting to fix?