Live it up!

"Let me put it this way, it did hemorrhage in the past and you could have died....but you didn't!"  These are not the words you would hope to hear from your neurosurgeon during your first visit with him...but for me, these are the exact words I heard yesterday.

I recently found out I have a pituitary adenoma (benign tumor on the pituitary gland) and more specifically they believe it is what is called a prolactinoma. Yesterday was my first visit with a neurosurgeon and he explained what my next steps will be. I will need to see an opthamologist, an endocrinologist, back to the neuro, then back for another MRI in a year...after that? We will just need to closely monitor it for the rest of my life...Ideal? No. Life threatening? No. Am I still scared to death? Hell Yes!

I asked him if I should avoid anything that might make the tumor worse: foods, certain activities, medications, electronics. He looked at me calmly and offered what he called his "personal philosophy:" "We are all going to die someday; we don't know when, we don't know how...so live it up!" I nervously chuckled and shot a concerned glance at my mother. He continued with the statement that I used to open this entry "...you could have died but you didn't. So be thankful for the life you have. You will get no restrictions from me. Live and eat as closely to nature as you can and as long as you are enjoying your life, I will not tell you what you shouldn't do."
Hmmm...a little too philisophical for a neurosurgeon perhaps. At first, I thought "is this guy nuts?!" All I wanna know is whether the tumor will grow if I have a drink or if it will hemorrhage when I use an iPod! Ok ok..a little ridiculous I admit, but when you hear news that you have a tumor capable of causing blindness if it grows to closely to your optic nerve, you want to learn everything you can about it.

I left a little more worried than I was after I first found out what I have and I broke down in the elevator, crying on my mom's shoulder. That night I could not sleep, so I went downstairs where my mom was reading on the couch...I lost it. I cried harder than I have in long time. The kind of crying that wrenches your stomach and moves your whole body...

This morning, I went for a long bike ride and I could not get the neurosurgeon's words out of my head. "...you could have died..." "...live it up..." "...enjoy your life..." That is when I decided to start something new... at first, I thought I would try something new every day for a year...I quickly came to my senses and realized that is 365 new things...perhaps a bit too ambitious. 

Now don't get me wrong. I have done some amazing things in my life so far. I've seen mountain gorillas in Rwanda, climbed the Great Wall of China, lived in Argentina and spoken Spanish in Italy (I though it would be close enough to Italian to get by, but people just thought I was crazy   :-/ But there are obviously so many things out there I still need and want to try.  So I am going to do something new once a week for the next year...52 things I have never done before-much more manageable. Many of these things will be mundane, some exciting, some planned, some by accident. My hope is to end the year with a sense of accomplishment and a better understanding of who I am as a person and the life I want to live.

So it starts today...Week 1. What new thing am I trying this week you ask? Well of course I am going to count this blog as my first new thing. I have never been a fan of blogs...don't ask why because I'm not really sure, I just have never liked them. However, I knew this would be the best way to document the next year (and it didn't hurt that doing it this way puts a tick mark next to number 1 and leaves me with only 51 more things I have to try :-)

I will close this first entry by saying I am truly thankful that this revelation is not the result of a much more serious diagnosis. It could certainly be worse, but this tumor is something I will have to deal with for the rest of my life and I need to come to terms with that or I will never be able to "Live it up"