For more than a month, I’ve been running my fingers over the new\u00a0holes in my head.<\/p>\n
OK, they’re not actual holes – you can’t look\u00a0into\u00a0them and see my brain. They’re large dents and grooves. Seeing as how they’re in my skull<\/em>, they feel pretty freakin’ significant.<\/p>\n They are near the incision that was made for my brain surgery<\/a>, but they aren’t from the plates and screws that held my skull together while the drilled-out piece mended.<\/p>\n My hair has grown in, so no one\u00a0can see these dents and grooves. Like my other hidden anxieties<\/a>, they lurk\u00a0below the surface, reminding me why I dodge\u00a0the mantel<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ve been trying to ignore\u00a0these indentations, and how\u00a0my head\u00a0is still so sensitive on my right\u00a0side. The docs\u00a0told me that these things would\u00a0“take awhile” to go away.<\/p>\n It’s been almost five months.\u00a0I had begun\u00a0to wonder whether my skull was coming apart.<\/p>\n I went to my primary care doctor. He felt my skull and\u00a0said the groove was an inch and half long and the dent was about 4 millimeters wide.<\/p>\n He called it a “skull separation.”\u00a0He didn’t know if this was normal.<\/p>\n It took almost a week to get someone from the neurosurgeon’s office\u00a0to call me back, during which I tried not to obsess about this “skull separation,”\u00a0and failed.<\/p>\n Finally<\/b>\u00a0the nurse, Hal, called me back today.<\/p>\n I described the indented area to him, and he asked lots of questions. Then he said, “It’s OK. What you’re describing is well within the normal range.”<\/p>\n Wow – talk about a new normal! Dents in my head, a groove, skull separation – normal!<\/p>\n Oh, but wait … so … why are there dents in my head?<\/p>\n “Well, we are\u00a0careful during the surgery of course, but it’s still a trauma to the brain,” Hal\u00a0said. “There’s a lot of inflammation and the body responds to that.”<\/p>\n And how does the body respond?<\/p>\n “It absorbs\u00a0everything in that area.”<\/p>\n It sucks\u00a0up the extra fluids and tissue like a shop vac. And yes, it even absorbs bone.<\/p>\n So basically my body is eating my skull in order to heal it.<\/p>\n This is normal.<\/p>\n It’s good, even. A reflex that is, in its own perverse way, a sign of health.<\/p>\n Severe trauma = severe cleanup. You can just picture the little German cell commanders: “We VILL get zis mess cleant up, ALL uf IT.”<\/p>\n Plus: All the materials get recycled – the calcium in the bone, for example. A conscientious consumer, this\u00a0body o’ mine.<\/p>\n But, hmmm, isn’t that kind of like recycling your roof while you’re still living in the house? I thought I actually needed that bone? I mean, it’s like, my skull<\/em>?<\/p>\n I asked Hal, “Will my body eventually figure out that it’s eaten too much? Will it be like, ‘Oops! Went too far there. Better start backfilling.’ ”<\/p>\n Well, yes, he said.<\/p>\n OK, got it. The extreme-makeover healing will eventually reverse.<\/p>\n My body will then\u00a0use tissue, blood, old socks, or whatever else is lying around to fill in the holes in my head.<\/p>\n “And how long will this take?” I ask him.<\/p>\n The usual breezy, inexact answer: “It could take up to a year.”<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Hal says, “don’t worry about it.”<\/p>\n Right.<\/p>\n I’m just doin’ time. Me and my cannibal head.<\/p>\n Got 225\u00a0days to go until my one-year anniversary.<\/p>\n Figures it would be a leap year.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is, what else, a 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For more than a month, I’ve been running my fingers over the new\u00a0holes in my head. OK, they’re not actual holes – you can’t look\u00a0into\u00a0them and see my brain. They’re large dents and grooves. Seeing as how they’re in my skull, they feel pretty freakin’ significant. They are near the incision that was made for … read more Holes in my head<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[67,485,493,862,568,861,504,860,502],"class_list":["post-7508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-67","tag-aneurysm","tag-brain","tag-dents","tag-healing","tag-holes","tag-recovery","tag-skull","tag-surgery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7508"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8236,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7508\/revisions\/8236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}