I have been remiss in introducing the neurosurgeon… especially since he was kind of the main man in the first part of my adventure, so let’s meet him. Dr. Eric Marmor is a neurosurgeon with Trillium Health Partners, and I was lucky enough to be matched with him to perform the surgery to get rid of the four centimeter big boy. However. when I first met the surgeon, and noted his name in my phone, autocorrect of course kicked in and my phone recorded his name as DR MARMOT. Which is now stuck in my head. Oops.

As you may recall, December 13th was the big day and it was the doc’s time to shine. But before we got to that part of the day…

A few minutes after the locked bed incident, the door to the OR is propped open and I can see Doc Marmot in the hallway in conversation with another neurosurgeon. The two surgeons then enter the OR, and move their conversation over to a set of monitors that were showing a detailed graphic of a brain. The docs get deep into discussion here for a few minutes, and then two other members of the team drift over… ostensibly to glean important medical insights from the two neurosurgeons… who are discussing the following:

“Maybe we can go over?… or how about going around the back on this side?… or possibly even under…?”

This goes on for several minutes before one of them realizes that I’m totally paying attention to this conversation… and again, I just couldn’t help myself… I had to say it: “Oh I can totally hear you! and I’m going to assume that you are talking about someone else’s brain. I would hope at this point that you already have game plan for me, and you aren’t still discussing surgical options!”

The whole group turns to look at me… I’m in stitches… the looks on their faces were priceless… one of the docs confirmed that it was definitely not my brain under discussion… and then they scattered like ants… I felt a little bad for breaking up the party, but I was having such a laugh that it was totally worth it 🙂

So yes, brain surgery is terrifying. But being able to see the lighter side of life probably did more for me that day than knowing any other pertinent details about the procedure. This approach may not be the right one for everyone, but it got me through what has probably been the most traumatic day of my life. And I survived.