Those Pesky Brain Tumors

I'm lying in bed with a pounding headache, unable to sleep for the third night in a row when my right ear starts ringing. My brain tumor is back. And it's for real this time. There's no other plausible explanation for these tell tale symptoms. None. Why, oh why, do I continue to hold my cell phone directly against my fat head and always on the right side when I know damn well that it could, maybe, sort of cause brain tumors!? Anger followed by sorrow overtakes me as I think about my four-year-old son and the fact that he's going to grow up without a mom. He'll go through the hardship of me being so sick that I can't run around and play gorillas with him for hours on end. I'll let him down every time I'm too tired to get out of bed to see the really cool fort he made out of the couch cushions. He'll develop abandonment issues as I lay dying; the last breath rattling out of my chest; his mama leaves him forever. Goodbye to any future healthy relationships for him. I've ruined his young life already. I'm an asshole. 

And I am, but not for dying on my son. Or for knowing for sure that I'd contracted tetanus after cutting my finger to the bone as I pried the little, tiny top off of a bottle of super glue with a pair of manicure scissors. Or for the time I knew I had pancreatic cancer because my lower back was achy for several days. Nor for the other several brain tumors or because of the early onset dementia. Stiff neck, headache, itchy arms...meningitis. Heart attack. Deep vein thrombosis. Or prosopagnosia, but I have that for real and I am at fault if I've passed it along to my sweet, innocent son. Not to mention the cases of lung cancer, epilepsy, Parkinson's, skin cancer, bone cancer, colon cancer...you name it, I have or will develop it in my thick head for real, to me. It's truly scary and it's legitimately bad for my health.

Welcome to my maniacal world. Bwahahahahahahahahaha.

I read a magazine blurb that, as a person with health anxiety I have no business reading, was called "Health Scare of the Week" about people with hypochondria suffering from anxiety and therefore developing heart conditions and then inevitably...an ugly, horrific, early death. Not. Fair. That's just another embarrassing body breakdown situation to worry about. Thanks unhelpful magazine article! This rickety, old, fallible body is doomed. And it is whether I worry about it or not. It's just a matter of figuring out how to enjoy the ride in order to live a more pleasant life. I can see it now, my worry-free existence whizzing by; days flowing into years into decades of bliss. 

Here's when I became a tried-and-true asshole; I stayed up late one night researching what was "wrong" with my beautiful, intelligent, funny four-year-old son after reading an article that mentioned an issue with kids that happened to have the same symptoms as being a four-year-old. My sane husband mentioned as he walked past my bulging-eyeballed face which was shoved into my computer screen, "If you want to get any sleep tonight you might want to stop googling medical stuff."  The voice of reason passively crawled around in my dense head before getting stuck in some necrotic brain matter, never to be heard from again. I continued researching my son's non-existent issue. After going to bed buzzing with apprehension I ended up waking in the middle of the dark, scary night as my brain cranked out reason after reason that my boy is doomed. 

My son shows me myself on a regular basis, the good, the bad and the hideously ugly.  My bad and ugly have never been a problem, well, except in all of my relationships with everybody I've ever known, but those relationships can easily be severed as I point my incriminating finger at everyone but myself. Now that I'm responsible for showing another human being how to be in this world I need to stop being an asshole and start taking responsibility for my baggage which no longer serves me or those around me. Hearing my son use "like" when he's not indicating an affinity for something or comparing things really gets my goat. It means I say it and that I've tainted his newly acquired speaking skills with this annoying filler word. But the real problems come into play when I show him how to be anxious about life, that the world is not safe and, therefore, he should be small, and that alcohol is the way to assuage life's problems. You know, little things like that.  

It's time to grow up and bring all of the years of therapy, meditation, and my trauma free adult life to the fore. It's time to catch myself in the act and explain to my son that there are healthier ways of relating to situations and I'm working on doing that. It's time to take the plunge and see what happens. It just might help shrink those brain tumors. Or not.