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I Had a Brain Tumor
At 24, I thought I was invincible — I was wrong.
Everything begins somewhere.
A tremor in the left hand, slight muscle weakness, the inability to paint my own fingernails. I accepted these changes as subjects of fascination — idiosyncrasies particular to my body. When I told my mother, she suggested I incorporate more vitamin C into my diet.
In winter 2010, the snow piled up against the windows of my garden apartment while I vomited breakfast, then water, and finally a bitter yellow substance for an entire day until I was too weak to move to the bathroom anymore. I fell asleep on the floor wondering whether I would wake up the following day.
“How sick do you have to be to call for an ambulance?” I texted my roommate, who was away on holiday.
After that episode, I began to experience strange throbbing headaches — little lightning storms that I combated by closing my eyes and standing perfectly still until they receded. I worked as an office manager at a nonprofit near Manhattan’s Herald Square. I lived alone then, an hour into the depths of Brooklyn, in an Italian neighborhood I reluctantly cherished. I took dance classes five nights a week, unless I was attending a reading or a lecture or a party. Those were long days, late nights. I lived off coffee and dollar slices of…
