When I tell you that I didn’t know what to expect of the doctor yesterday, I’m not exaggerating or embellishing. What I knew of this office and this doctor consisted of a blurb on a website and a recommendation of a blog reader.

I met my mom at the office and we rode up in the empty elevator. We were greeted at the entrance to the office by a man in a shirt and a tie, and then shuffled through 3 stations of paperwork to a room within 5 minutes of arrival. But not before noticing that big plaques on the wall indicating that Oprah and Denzel Washington helped create this crazy neurological paradise.

(Also, it was funded in large part by The Brain Trust. And that cracks my shit up. A neurosurgery center sponsored by the Brain Trust? Pretty much my favorite thing ever.)

The nurse came in, entered my medical history into the computer (which took roughly 12 years and a lot of explaining) and took my vitals, revealing my 103 beat per minute pulse and the sheer level of nervousness I was fighting.

After a lengthy wait, the neurosurgeon walked in, introduced himself and got down to business. He had already looked at all 9 discs of MRIs that I’d brought in, read through all the lab results and medical records I’d brought and was ready to make a plan.

He was thoughtful, but straightforward. He was hopeful, but honest. He had a plan, but admited it might not get us anywhere.

It’s hard to take news like that. Because on the one hand: a plan! On the other: suspicion that it’s for naught. It’s manic-depressive news and I’m still digesting it.

He dispelled some of our worries. My duraplasty is not the problem, and the leak that may or may not exist, isn’t in my brain. If it exists, it’s in my spine. The best test to find it isn’t a cisternogram, so the lack of leaks on that test doesn’t really mean much to him.

He created some new ones. My headache is typical of low pressure, but having a spinal headache after a lumbar puncture when you already have low pressure is not. The low pressure could be a false reading, but the fact that it happened with the lumbar puncture under fluroscopy tends to suggest otherwise.

In other words, he has no idea what’s going on. So now we start testing.

On Monday evening I’m having a 3 hour MRI of my entire spine. It won’t require a lumbar puncture, just a crap load of time and patience. I haven’t had a spinal MRI in years, so this is a totally reasonable and probably needed first step.

He’ll call me on Tuesday and let me know the results. If nothing shows up or if it’s inconclusive, we’ll do a CT myelogram. And since it requires a lumbar puncture, we’ll measure my opening pressure then and see what we’re working with.

And if that comes back clean, he just doesn’t know. At best it means we need a new theory, at worst, it means we move onto pain management. Pain management. Those two words that make me want to weep because they mean we’re giving up again. They mean there’s nothing to fix. I need there to be something to fix.

For now, I’m keeping my eyes on Monday. Hoping for results that have easy solutions, results that give us a real plan to fix this. To stop this pain. To make this nightmare end. In case you’re keeping track, yes, that’s me investing my hope in a doctor again. I can’t help it.

Without hope there is nothing but pain. And so I cling to it, allowing myself to be battered and bruised by disappointment, believing that some day that hope will become reality.

Believing that some day, I’ll have my life back.

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