I prayed so hard going into that room.
The last few days and hours before surgery, I was in a full panic. I wasn't only afraid of the surgery. I was afraid I would wake up and not know who I was, or not remember my own life. That was the fear that had me.
When I came to, I was alert. I knew exactly who I was. And I was eerily calm.
I couldn't see much. My face was swollen and I couldn't see out of one eye. But I knew my family was already there. They had been there all night. My son, my husband, my mom, my sister and one of my dear friends. Seeing my son was a blessing I can't put into words.
Nobody told me I might feel that calm. Nobody told me the pain might not be what I braced for, at least not right away. I had built it up so big in my head that the quiet almost didn't make sense. So if you are waiting on the worst feeling of your life, know that it may not show up the way you think.
Mine was a meningioma, and I had my craniotomy in July 2025. It's benign. We are grateful for that.
It is still a brain tumor. They still had to cut my head open to get to it. And because of where it was, the surgeons knew before they started that they would not be able to get all of it. I still had gamma knife treatment ahead of me, which came about two and a half months later, in October 2025. Thankfully it only took one treatment. I did not know what my results would be.
So when people said, “Well, at least it's not the C word,” I know they meant to comfort me. It didn't. Benign and easy are not the same thing. If you know someone going through this, skip the “at least” and just say you are thinking of them.
Everyone else's life goes back to normal. Yours is still in recovery.
I'm a year out and I'm still healing. I'm doing more than I was, but at the start there was no driving, so people had to take me to appointments. There was a lot of sitting, resting and sleeping, or trying to. I slept propped up for about two and a half months before I could slide my pillow down even a little. It was almost five months before I slept lying down. My vision is still affected, and that's just how it is. I get an MRI every six months to see if the tumor is shrinking. Time will tell. That's where we are, and there is nothing to hide about it.
The normal things, just going and doing, came back slower than I wanted. They did come.
The first time I cooked a meal, I squinted through one eye and I cried. My husband asked what was wrong. I told him nothing was wrong. I get to do this again.
It was eggs and grits. That's all. But I didn't know if I would be able to do it, or if I would remember how. I cried for me, for my husband and for our son. While I healed, our son was staying with family friends, and I was staying at another friend's house so I would have full-time care while my husband went back to work. It was a lot of people carrying us.
Accept the help. Don't be too proud. Don't rush. Make sure you rest.
And never leave your prayer out.
Cherrell