By KT Ryan

The Featured Art is “Dead or Dreaming?” by Greta Delapp

Month 1: June

“Promise me you’re not gonna die,” my eight-year-old Ellie said.

It was a simple request during her bedtime tuck-in. All she needed was a one sentence guarantee that the operation to remove my brain tumor would go well. I couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong—a spinal fluid leak, paralysis, even death? Ellie’s arms formed a vice-grip around my body. I kneaded Ellie’s pillow, worried that she’d never be able to trust an adult again if I promised success and then something bad happened.

With twelve hours to go before I went under the knife, I resorted to chanting the same thing I’d been saying since my diagnosis one month earlier: that my surgeon, Dr. T. was “the best of the best.” It had worked well up until now.

Ellie squeezed me harder and repeated the same demand. When I couldn’t give it to her, she began sobbing. We went back and forth as if on repeat, the only difference being that she became more hysterical every minute. At some point, my eleven and thirteen year-old boys joined us. They shoved aside her zoo of stuffed animals, jumped onto the covers, and locked their lanky limbs around my legs.

“Oh, my pumpkins,” I said. “Remember how amazing my surgeon is?”

Ellie pressed her forehead into my chest as if to anchor herself against the convulsions of her sobs. Eventually, her tears began dissolving the mask of bravery on my boys’ faces; they mopped up their own tears with their sleeves. I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to be strong, focusing on the smell of their no-tears shampoo. I wished for a moment that I was in my happy place—an ocean, splashing forward through water with not a care in the world.

“Why. Can’t. You. Just. Promise us!” Ellie’s words punched the air one by one.

An hour later, I was still scrambling for a better way to reassure them. I couldn’t think straight. I hadn’t prepared for the desperation of their inconsolable grip. Instead of reassuring them with statistics, I inexplicably took a different approach. A doubling down of sorts. I told my three children that my surgeon was a superhero.

My children had always loved superheroes, particularly from the Marvel Universe. They were convinced it was superior to the Buffyverse, the world where Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer decimated demons with nothing but smarts, martial arts, and a wooden stake. When my children rolled their eyes at me about Buffy, which they always did, I sometimes pivoted to Aquaman because I’d spent most of my life swimming every day. They’d still gasp; he was not a Marvel creation either.

“Tell me something,” I said, searching my mind for what I knew about Marvel characters. “Wasn’t Doctor Strange the world’s best neurosurgeon before he injured his hands?”

Three pairs of golden-brown eyes lit up around me. I knew then that there was no turning back.

That’s how I began talking up Dr. T like he was the world’s best medical superhero. Worst case scenario was that, if the surgery went wrong, they’d stop believing in non-human abilities. I could handle that. Soon, we were imagining a costume for him: shiny blue scrubs, a surgical mask, and a superpowered set of goggles. We armed him with a skull saw and scalpel.

While I hugged them goodnight—even though I was secretly distraught that it might be good-bye—my children could at least conjure up calming visions of a formidable savior in charge of my surgery.

When I woke up in the operating room, doctors in surgical masks floated in and out of view. It was cold. So cold. My eyes blurred and could not focus on the bright lights overhead. The clinking of medical instruments and the chatter of doctors sounded warbled, as if underwater. A thought began to form: I’m alive! My children still have a mother.

Relief was quickly replaced by a gripping fear that the surgery was not over. That my brain might still be exposed from the hole they’d had to cut into my skull to remove the tumor. I froze every muscle and held my breath.

Dr. T’s face hovered over mine, his mouth moving. I could only make out occasional words, like “good” and “removed,” but they were enough to allow me to drift back to sleep.

The next time I woke, a large man with a freckled nose was steering my gurney down a breezy hallway. The checkerboard pattern of ceiling tiles blurred above me, and an overpowering smell of cologne or deodorant assaulted my nose. We turned a corner and my stomach lurched. I fought back the urge to vomit. To still my view, I fixated on the hospital attendant’s face; he was looking straight ahead, eyes vacant and tired.

I tried to speak but my vocal chords only forced out a crackly whisper, “What’s happening?”

The attendant ignored me, though I was so close to him that I could see the details of animal tattoos snaking up his forearms. Through dry lips, I repeated the question again.

Finally, he shrugged his muscular shoulders and said, “I only push patients.”

A stronger wave of vertigo discombobulated what was left of my composure. “I’m gonna be sick,” I mumbled.

He finally looked down at me, and then his mouth opened wide. “You look lopsided!” he said.

I thought he meant that my body was too far over on one side of the gurney. I heaved my leaden body a little more to the bed’s center, trying to make a narrower version of myself.

He shook his head and pointed at my face. “Your face. It’s lopsided.”

I freed my hands from a pile of blankets and began patting my face. One side seemed like it always had. My hand explored the right side of my face faster, searching for the familiar but not finding it. Instead, I was exploring new terrain. I found that the skin on that cheek fell slack, pooling down towards my ear, almost in the same way an old sock bunches around an ankle. My right eyebrow hung heavy, melding with my eyelashes. I tried to blink. My eye wouldn’t close. The whole right side of my face was unresponsive. It occurred to me then that maybe my superhero had not come through for me. I was alive, but this had been a botched rescue.

Month 2: July

I’d been living with facial palsy for over a month. When I learned that it’s also called “flaccid paralysis,” I thought of penises in need of Viagra. I wanted to laugh about that, but I could no longer smile. My facial nerves would not cooperate.

I still hadn’t looked in a mirror. Not fully anyway. I’d sneaked peeks at tiny sections of my face in a palm-sized compact, always snapping it shut after a few seconds. I’d confirm for the umpteenth time my heavy brow and flaccid lips transformed half of my face into Frankenstein. My smile, the one thing that had lit up my face, was gone—an em dash leading to nothing. Dr. T said that I’d know by the one-year mark whether the facial palsy was permanent. A whole year? Was he kidding?

Growing up, I’d always considered my smile to be my only superpower. I was not pretty. That was the message I’d received subtly, and not so subtly, from those around me. I blamed my chubby cheeks, pointed nose, and the constellations of moles dotting my skin. At least when I laughed, my normal-looking lips would part revealing two neat rows of white teeth; then, those roly-poly cheeks could at least frame a warm and sincere smile. I’d learned how to use that smile over the years to seem more approachable. It had given me the necessary confidence to fit in.

Now that smile was gone, and I didn’t know who I was anymore.

When Ellie suggested I invent some sort of sling for my drooping cheek, I told my kids about an old episode of Seinfeld, when Kramer wanted to invent some sort of male brassiere for another character’s sagging breasts; they thought of calling it the “Manssiere” or “The Bro.” It was easier to drum up names for a facial bra (The Cheeky or The Chin Up Bra) than it was to think about how detached I felt from my body.

Month 4: October

I was standing in our neglected backyard shed trying to remember why I went there in the first place. I stared at the tall rows of garden tools, holiday decorations and unused camping equipment. I finally spotted the costume box and remembered why I’d ventured into the cobwebs. I needed a costume for Halloween.

I’d never liked the pressure of figuring out what to be. This year will be different, I told myself. One entire day where I could cover up my facial palsy and blend in with everyone else.

My kids had already figured out their costumes. My older two, Finn and Cameron, would go as Ketchup and Mustard. “It’s all about the candy,” one of them had said in defense of wearing the same costume for the third year in a row. Ellie had decided to dress up as Athena months earlier, having positioned her costume on the floor, the bracelet and strappy shoes laid out where her arms and feet would be.

I rummaged through years of my past costumes, coming first to a brown, long-haired wig. I’d worn it in 2009 as “the Octomom,” a woman who’d been in the news that year for having octets via fertility treatments. I’d strapped two-month-old Ellie into a Baby Bjorn and worn her on my chest along with seven dolls. My then-husband Tom had dressed up as my fertility specialist, wearing a lab coat and holding a turkey baster.

What I really wanted was to be able to live full-time under a sheet like a Halloween ghost. Instead, I held the bright red and blue of my old Wonder Woman costume in my hands, tempted by the Halloween promise that anyone can be a superhero. It hadn’t seemed like too much of a stretch a few years earlier—I’d felt like a supermom balancing work, three children, and multiple volunteer roles. Now, I was holding on by a thread.

Deeper in the box were three Venetian masks that my mother had brought back from Italy for the kids one summer. They were stunningly painted and sequined. Too beautiful to have been in a box in the shed. I slid my thumb across the satin ribbons affixed to the mask. Flipping my camera phone to selfie-mode, I held one of the masks up to my face. It only covered me up from my forehead to my nose. The skin on my right cheek sagged heavily beneath it. I pushed the delicate mask to the bottom of the box with more force than it likely could handle. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to be. I returned inside and ordered what I needed on-line.

The morning of Halloween I swooped into the kitchen wearing a black cape, holding a musical conductor’s staff, and hiding my face behind a one-sided mask that covered almost all of the right side of my face.

Finn barked out a laugh. “Who . . . or what are you supposed to be?” he asked.

“The Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera,” I said, aware that the reference wouldn’t mean anything to my kids. “A character who haunted a musical theater.”

“Why did he wear just half a mask?” Ellie said.

“One side of his face was disfigured from a fire or something,” I said. “It works for me too, right?”

Finn gave me the “whatever” eyeroll and Cameron followed suit. Ellie ran around behind me and held up my cape like it was the train of a wedding dress.

At the Halloween parade at Ellie’s school, I swooped around campus in my cape feeling a necessary confidence building behind the veil of my mask. Old friends told me how much they liked my costume. I began rekindling some of those friendships that I’d avoided since June. I even giggled. Then, just as I was coming back to life, the spell was broken. Two people, neither of whom knew about my surgery, pointed at the sliver of sagging skin that was still visible at the bottom of the mask, asking how I’d managed to create such convincing make-up. In the time it took to twirl my cape in escape, that glimpse into normalcy evaporated into thin air.

Month 6: December

A little tone returned to my face by the six-month mark. My days of looking like Droopy the Dog were mostly behind me. If I remained totally expressionless, people said they almost couldn’t tell that I had facial palsy. I could tell. Now, the skin on my face was as taut and unmovable as the muscles underneath, none of which responded to messages from my brain. I was waiting. Waiting for the facial nerves to regrow. My kids said that I needed the extremely fast healing power of Deadpool, a Marvel superhero who could regrow body parts in a flash. I feared I’d never heal.

Month 10: April

It had been ten months since my surgery. The same span of time it took my womb to carry each of my children. However, I could not birth this next phase of my life. I was still waiting to heal, waiting for the facial palsy to go away. I slashed a red mark across each day on my desk calendar like a diagonal scar. I held the Sharpie in my hand and tried to imagine that I was slaying my way forward, hoping that one day I’d feel like a warrior. An “acoustic neuroma warrior,” to be precise. That was the slogan stitched in bold letters on my Stanford Acoustic Neuroma Conference bag I’d received a few months ago. Since then, that canvas bag had mocked me from where it hung on a hook in my room, a crease collapsing the sketch of a brain next to the slogan. When the bag was handed to me at the conference check-in desk, I wanted to hand it back. I wasn’t deserving of the warrior moniker yet.

Surviving didn’t make me a warrior. I wasn’t displaying courage or perseverance. I was laying on my floor, sometimes on the cold bathroom tiles, wasting hours staring at the ceiling unable to be the person I once was. On one of my floor-laying moments, I decided that if I ever wanted to brim with joy or hum with curiosity again, or if I ever wanted to be able to look in a mirror and offer myself some love, I needed my old smile. But I was running out of time. Dr. T had said that it could take up to a year for my facial nerves to grow back. So, I had two more months to heal. Two months left to maybe, just maybe, feel like an actual “acoustic neuroma warrior.”

Month 11: May

One more month to go and it wasn’t looking good. I was constantly reminded of the asymmetry of my face through the painful and tight way half of my mouth held the other half back, making my words come out jumbled. Liquids trickled back out of my mouth and down my chin. My eye couldn’t fully close unless I held my lashes down with my fingers.

I had to start thinking about a backup plan, some sort of path to acceptance. I’d been so focused on the outcome of my own costume—the smile I’d worn for forty-five years before my surgery. Could I learn to love my limitations, frozen face and all? Or, should I be nurturing my other strengths? My heroine, Buffy, still came through when she briefly lost her powers, relying on her intellect and emotional acuity to save her life. She showed us her flaws, her pain, and her suffering—all of which she leveraged to become more than the sum of her superpowers.

I began chewing on the inside of my cheek, growing restless with the idea that I needed to do the whole self-love thing, the emotional work that my British upbringing had scorned for so long.

Month 12: June again

Dr. T’s Pepto-Bismol pink exam room seemed even smaller than it had one year earlier. Even though I’d come to expect it, Dr. T’s loud voice made me jump when he walked into the room.

“How’s the swimming?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, barely remembering how, one year earlier, I’d complained to him that I’d have to take time off from swimming because of the surgery. “I never ended up doing it much after. Still haven’t. Three kids, not enough time.” I didn’t mention how down I’d been or how much I’d struggled to get back to my old life since the surgery.

“Great news!” Dr. T said, looking at my MRI scans. “Your tumor hasn’t returned.”

“That’s good, I guess.” I’d forgotten to worry about the small chance the tumor could return. I was there because of my face.

“Let’s look at your facial reflexes.” He rubbed his hands briskly, warming them up before touching my cheeks. “Can you feel my fingers?”

“Yep,” I said.

He then moved a tissue closer to my eyeball until it touched my cornea.

“Ouch!”

“Looks like you still can’t blink,” he said. “Still using the eye gel?”

“Yep. But I need the Goldilocks amount—too much and it’s too blurry to see, too little and my eye dries out.”

He tugged at my face and asked me to try various facial expressions—frown, grimace, surprise, smirk, wide-toothed grin, and that ridiculous selfie shot women do when they pucker their lips for the camera. My only successful expression was a wiggly smirk.

He exhaled a long and slow breath. “I’m sorry to say…this is it. Your facial nerves are as good as they’re gonna get.”

“What? Couldn’t the twelve-month thing just be an average?” I pictured a neat little bell curve with an ample hill of recovery on the other side of the year mark.

“Nope,” he said. He rubbed the top of his bald head as if he’d found dust. “We’d have seen more healing by now if it was going to happen.”

I stuck my head forward like a chicken. “So that’s it? You’re not even going to leave me with the luxury of hope?”

“Sorry. Wish I could.” He bowed his head, no longer meeting my eyes.

“Isn’t there anything else that could be done? Facial surgery? Anything?” I pointed at the computer screen in the room as if it held a trove of cures.

“Sorry kiddo. At this point, I’d just recommend getting Botox on your good side to give you a little more symmetry when you try to smile.”

He didn’t say, “when you smile.” He’d said, “when you try to smile.” I’d forever be trying to be myself underneath the unmovable mask my face had become.

I rushed out the door as if distance between me and him could make his words less true. Waiting for the elevator, I chewed my lower lip still stupefied. He’d given me a conclusion. An ending. A final and clear: this is it! The reflection of my face hovered before me in the shiny metal of the elevator doors. I didn’t want to take it in. The fingers of anxiety squeezed my chest and I studied my feet instead. It’s just a face, I told myself. Half a face, really. There were bigger things to worry about than a face. It’s not something that’ll kill me.

By the time the elevator doors opened to the first floor, I had convinced myself to go on with my day, forcing myself not to feel my feelings. A great coping mechanism. Surely there was a superhero who was good at that.

Month 14: August

Goggles in hand, water smacked against the boulder on which I stood. A drumbeat reminder of why I was standing at the edge of Lake Tahoe—to swim. One mile, maybe more. I used to be the type of person who would plunge right in. Instead, I kept my arms folded across my chest wondering what had become of me. I’d left my body that day of the surgery, becoming as frozen in time as my paralyzed face.

My three children were the only reason I was going for a swim—my first real swim since the surgery. They needed to see me living life again. They thought I was “broken.” They’d said as much on the drive up there.

For the long car ride, I’d chosen the audiobook, “I Am Malala” based on a top-ten list. When I told my children that it was about an advocate for girls’ education in Pakistan, they groaned in unison, complaining that it sounded like a school-required book. Malala’s prologue launched right into the moment a member of the Taliban put a bullet in her head. My children were riveted.

Somewhere after our ears had popped from gaining elevation on California’s Interstate-80, when we’d left behind suburban sprawl for pine trees and crisp air, the story eventually returned to the shooting scene. When I heard Malala’s voice tell us that the bullet had sliced her facial nerves, I sat up tall in the driver’s seat.

“She ended up with facial palsy! Just like you!” Ellie exclaimed.

I mumbled something back, imagining Malala in that bus, still processing Ellie’s comparison of Malala to me. My hand instinctively went to my face. Until Malala, I hadn’t heard anyone else recount struggles with facial palsy. I’d always felt so alone. Like I no longer belonged anywhere, not even to myself.

Malala then explained that one of her surgeries attempted to repair her facial palsy.

“Can you get that surgery?” Ellie asked.

Her brothers repeated her question. “Yeah, would that fix you?”

“Fix me?” I squeaked in protest.

Finn, my then thirteen year old, spoke with such excitement that I could see his curls shaking in the rear-view mirror. “Yeah, then you could maybe smile again. I bet it could fix your—”

“What’s with the ‘fixing’ comments?” I tried to sound playful, but my voice cracked.

Finn poked my arm. “Well, it’s just that your face—”

“Kids!” I said, whipping my head over my shoulder to change lanes. “I am not broken!” I swerved the car onto a freeway exit.

“Why’re we getting off?” Finn asked.

“I just need to . . . rest for a few minutes.” I jammed the car into park and plonked my forehead down on the steering wheel. I’d been trying, day after day, to ignore my facial palsy, still fighting off all the touchy-feely inner work that might make me feel whole again. I really was broken.

After we arrived at my parents’ cabin, the kids ran to the back deck where the lake shimmered with its claim-to-fame shades of blue. I retreated to my room to find out more about Malala. I tried to be patient as the slow Wi-Fi unveiled photos of her. My fingers traced her face on my screen and then my face. Even though Malala was a heroine from Pakistan, and I was a 46-year-old mom thousands of miles away, I found someone who looked like me. I hadn’t known how much I needed to see a kindred face.

I don’t know how much time passed. I just remember Ellie suddenly plopping down in my lap. She was already rosy-cheeked with sand-speckled feet.

“Is that her?” Ellie asked. “I wanna see her, Mommy.”

I held my breath while we watched Malala giving an interview not long after the shooting. One of her eyes remained wide open in stark contrast to her other one which blinked normally. She spoke out of one side of her mouth, occasionally giving a lopsided smile. A smirk, at best. I buried my face in the back of Ellie’s hair thinking about when Ellie used to try to mold my cheek back into place as if it were clay, nudging the side of my lip upwards into a forced smile. I waited for her to make some sort of comment about how bad Malala looked. Instead, Ellie craned her neck to look at me and said, “She’s so awesome!” Then, she darted out of the room. Maybe my superhero was right there on the screen. A tingling sensation came over me, a thawing of sorts.

That week, I became obsessive, returning to videos of Malala again and again, stalking her, magnifying her face pixel by pixel. If a young girl could survive a bullet and then go on to become a world leader in education, the least my floundering-self could do would be to break out of its icy shell. If not for me, then for my children.

That’s what made me decide to return to one of the few places I’d always belonged—the water.

So, there I stood on that boulder at the lake’s edge trying to will myself into swimming, a hobby I’d had such a passion for before my brain tumor. The blinding glare of the alpine sun forced me to hold a hand over my eye, the one that couldn’t blink. Just like Malala’s. My children were ten feet behind me, egging me on. Finn yelled, “Be Aquaman, Mom!”

Lake Tahoe is a cold place to swim. In the summer, the water temperature is in the low sixties. Just a foot below the surface, it drops another ten degrees. I stepped off the boulder into inches of the chilly water. My legs immediately studded with goosebumps. I wanted to return to the cabin to read, preferably under the isolation of a blanket fort.
“C’mon, mom. Jump in!” Finn yelled.

I waded out to just beyond knee level, wincing at the cold snaking up my legs.

“We’re waiting,” sang Ellie.

I’d been waiting too, but for what? For life to flourish on its own? I pressed my goggles into my eye sockets, barely flinching when I snapped the strap behind my head. I inhaled deeply. Letting out a primal scream, I finally launched into a shallow dive. The frigid water filled my ears and hit my chest, knocking my breath from me. I was suddenly gasping for air. The muscles in my back constricted. My body roared to life as my survival instinct burst forth.

My breaths came sharply at first and my eyes darted back and forth in my goggles. Every sense was on overdrive. The skin on my exposed legs and arms burned from the cold, making my limbs flail. I couldn’t find a rhythm with my stroke or kick. Sensation drained away making the water slip between numb fingers. Feel the water. Find your grip.

Minutes passed as I fought for the peace and weightlessness swimming had always offered me before. But it wasn’t coming. Frustrated, I eventually decided to turn around. I must have been in the water fifteen minutes by then. I made one sloppy flip turn in the water, pushing my feet off of nothing. Then—something. A pull of my arms that felt natural, easy.

I craned my neck to look just above the surface and spied my children on the distant beach. Returning my gaze to the depths below, I began kicking a count of one-two-three-four and soon settled into my pace, that familiar beat I knew so well—an emanation from the inside of me, a call from my heart: I am ready, I am ready. Ready to do the work. Heat began radiating from my core reconnecting me to my shoulders, my elbows, my hands. My long and powerful legs. My mind and body synced with each other for the first time in months. Here I am, I thought. All I had out there was the rhythm of my stroke, the tinkling and crackling of the water, and the sound of my breath. And me.

Each moment was completely and beautifully my own. A spontaneous laugh came out of my mouth, pushing bubbles up and around my face. I’d entered the water for my kids, but I was swimming a path back to belonging in my skin once more. I didn’t need a rescuer with a cape to heal. Just the inspiration of a lopsided heroine from Pakistan and the courage to be myself again.

When the lake became shallow enough to stand up, I rose up tall, letting my chest expand with deep and full breaths. A palsied smile broke free on my face; I didn’t care what it looked like. In knee-deep water, my children ran to greet me, throwing their arms around my middle.

After they swam off, I angled my face towards the sun, letting the star’s warmth continue to thaw me, inside and out. I stood alone, practically naked in my suit. No cape. No mask. No costume fortifying me. I’d left the mask of my old smile—my former superpower—behind me once and for all. I would live now, fully alive, no matter what. I freed my hair from my swim cap and jogged out of the water, warming droplets falling from my limbs, ready.

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KT Ryan writes about motherhood, divorce, and facial palsy when she’s not busy trying to up her pickleball game. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Sun, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Pacific Coast Writers Collective. She can be followed @KTRyanAuthor.