Brain Surgery, Summer Vacations, Gigs and Lisa in College

Having ignored this blog for so long, I’m wrestling with “how to catch up?” I really prefer short(er) blog entries, so I’m just going to bullet-point what I want to mention and then write the individual entries later. Hopefully.

1. The Biggest News of All has to be Lisa’s Recovery. The brain surgery in July 2010 looks like it was a complete success.
2. Lisa is now a college student, going to Adrian College.
3. We did a LOT of traveling this summer (Lisa’s last summer before college) including: Chicago (more Second City classes), Gettysburg, New York City, Riverside, Iowa (future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk), Crazy Horse/Mt. Rushmore/Custer Nat’l Park/Wounded Knee, and FINALLY GOT TO THE BIGGEST BALL OF TWINE IN MINNESOTA.
4. Some cool gigs with five miles more and The Bonfire Poets
5. My first show selling beadwork
6. More Improv and Jam Sessions at Green Wood

OK, the bullet list is posted. Details coming soon.

Brain Surgery Posts

It’s been more than a year since Lisa’s brain surgery, so I’ve removed the password protection from all of our posts during those weeks in Summer of 2010.

Performance Studies and Pizza Night

I’ve posted some comments about both of those and other topics at my improv blog.

Ann Arbor Improv

Just posted an entry about the first Improv Class. It’s over, but I wrote a few memories. See my blog.

Started a New Blog

I started up a separate blog for bits related 1) the Improv coures I’ve been teaching, 2) the Thursday Night Jams and 3) Performance Studies at EMU (classes I’m taking this fall). So, go check that one out too if you want to see what I’m up to. The link is http://improv.fedel.com/wordpress. AND It’s powered by wordpress, the same folks who made this cool blog software we’re using right now.

Some thoughts about Amy after seeing the movie Inception

OK, so I got a little choked up and uncomfortable toward the end of the movie. Then I got thoughtful. That old philosophical training kicking in and rescuing me from my emotions.

Here’s the scene: DiCaprio’s dead wife – she committed suicide and he feels responsible – is very much alive for him in his subconscious. As part of the plot of the movie, he finds himself visiting her again. She is doing her best to convince him to stay there with her. He knows she is dead, he knows that the person sitting across the table talking to him is a projection of his own subconscious, but how tempting it must have been to stay there with her.

Would I stay locked deep in my subconscious with Amy if presented with that same choice? If there was some way to trigger that experience, if there was some way to bring her back to ‘life’, would I do it? If I could go back and create a world that matched our first years back in Michigan, maybe Amy at 7 and Lisa at 4, and then played itself out forward from there, would I? At some level, it would be obvious (to people outside of my head) that I was insane, living inside my own mind. But would I care? My family would be whole again. Amy and Lisa growing up together, healthy and whole. Best pals heading off to school and to driver’s training and to their first jobs and boyfriends and weddings and kids.

As Plato and Liebniz talked about (each in his own way), as the Buddhists insist and as the Matrix movies toyed with, isn’t reality a construct of our consciousness anyway? Intersubjectivity is our measure of reality (at least that’s the best I can make of it), but in a world of my own making, wouldn’t all of the other “people” argue that they were real? Could I make any convincing argument to them that they were wrong?

It made me wonder about how other people in the theater were reading it. Yet another experience of the Rorschach test that is reality – each of us in the theater brings our own experience to the film and each of us gets something slightly different out of it.

All of which is the intellectual part of it. The emotional part is that I allowed myself to sit there, only partially interested in the rest of the plot, and actually feel the weight of that decision. Sitting in the dark, watching the screen and replacing Mal’s face with Amy’s, it was difficult. I’ve been conditioned to immediately respond to questions like that with a quick “well, it’s better to live in an imperfect reality than a perfect illusion” but I begin to understand Cypher’s comment in the Matrix:

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.

Ultimately I still come down on the side that says living in reality – with all of its pain and imperfection – is better, but it was sure nice to visit with Amy for a few minutes.

Some Thoughts After Seeing the Movie Inception

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT>

Fascinating little movie. I expected to like it because I enjoyed the Matrix, kind of liked Stay, really enjoyed Identity up until the cop-out ending (“oooh, be careful, he’s still out there!”). I like movies where the writer/director plays with our sense of reality. Inception does that very intentionally. And it does it well. You have to pay attention (maybe too much attention?), but I think it pays off.

What I wasn’t expecting was the subplot. DiCaprio feels himself responsible for his wife’s suicide due to a doubt he planted in her mind about whether or not she was in reality or a dream. Toward the very end of the movie, he is in a deep-dive into his subconscious, where he has been “seeing” her on a regular basis. She knows that this trip may be the one in which he lets go of his guilt about her suicide, so tries to convince him to stay there with her. (“She” being his subconscious projection – go see it, it’s a very cool movie and I’m not going to try and explain it all here.)

The thing that hit me while I was sitting in the theater is this: what a temptation it must have been for him to stay down there. Down in his subconscious where she was still alive. He had something to pull him back – his two kids in the real world – and ultimately he does return. At least that’s how I read the ending. The director leaves it ambiguous and there’s a lot of discussion posts on the Internet about what a clever lad he was and how it questions how we look at reality. Christopher Nolan has only done a few movies, like Insomnia and the Dark Night, but it appears clear that he likes to play with our heads. Personally, I felt like it was a cop out. I’ve been trying to figure out why. Part of me wants to be really impressed by what he did – wow, a meditation on the nature of consciousness and dream states – but I think that this movie came off more like a thriller and I wanted a better, a more solid ending. I wanted diCaprio’s character to get his happy ending.

The next post is very probably a big part of the reason.

July 18, 2010 – post 1 (7:30 p.m.)

I think my post yesterday gave the impression that we were going to be back in Ann Arbor today – not so. Lisa was discharged but we decided to stay in Cleveland one more night just to make sure everything’s fine. We’re driving home sometime Monday.

July 18, 2010 – post 2 (11 a.m.)

We just got our walking papers – Lisa is officially discharged and free to go!

I talked with the docs about last night’s excursions and nobody was surprised, it could have been anything from 1) the side effects of one of the drugs to 2) sheer exuberance and celebration about having all of this behind her and about all of the love and support she’s been getting.

We’re going with number 2.

She remembers our walks very fondly and is still singing the praises of her surgical team. In particular Dr. Devin, the anesthesiologist who got her over her toughest fear – the fear of being put under.

We are packed and about to walk down to M35, the Peds Epilepsy Monitoring ward where she spent her first 3 visits. She’s loving the freedom to walk on and off the ward, on and off of the floor, and in and out of the building.

Lisa was describing to Jean her visit to the chapel last night. She was completely relaxed and talking out loud to God, thanking God for bringing her through all of this.

What a night.

July 18, 2010 – post 1 (3 a.m.)

It’s been an interesting few hours.

I’ve been pushing Lisa around the hospital building in a wheelchair since about 1 a.m. She asked me if we could go for a walk, which we did, then returned to the room. But, she wanted to go on another walk and was (slightly) insistent. When we got going, she started chatting pretty close to nonstop.

She’s been chatty all evening. We visited the 3rd floor (M35) around midnight to see if any of the nurses were there who had worked with us during our last visits. A couple of them were and it was a nice visit. Lisa chatted a lot about her hair, about Harry Potter, about her surgery. Jean commented on how chatty Lisa was being.

During our walk around the hospital, Lisa was talking a bit non-stop about how protected and safe she is feeling, the love surrounding her, the posts on her blog, the prayer quilt. It was wonderful.

And there is a “but”. (Maybe with me there is always a “but”.)

I’m wondering if this is a manic thing. The overall feeling of elation and her non-stop chatty expression. I am not concerned – even if it IS related to the surgery, I assume it’s temporary. I am writing it down for two reasons. The first is the same reason I’m writing this stuff down at all – I am hoping that someone may know someone who will go through a similar thing in the future and can maybe get some insight and comfort from our experience. There is so much comfort for Lisa and us in knowing what is coming next. Lisa had no problems at all this time with going under the anesthetic because she knew what was coming, she met the doctors who were doing it, she expressed her concerns and they addressed them. Knowledge really IS power.

The second reason I’m writing it down is for myself in 6 months or a year. When we see how she is a year from now, I can look back at this and remember what we went through to get there.

We were warned that sometimes people go into a depression after surgery like this. If that happens, then it’s reasonable to wonder if this is a similar type of reaction.

We went outside and sat for ten minutes watching the water fountain, enjoying the sounds of the water splashing and the quiet night. We talked about the operation, about her feeling so amazed that it’s all behind her now, about the love she is feeling constantly flowing her way.

We went back inside and into the chapel. I played “Sanctuary” while she prayed out loud to God, thanking God for everything that had happened and was happening, for Rupert (Emily’s bear), for family and friends, for Kayla’s beautiful card.

She’s in bed now, covered with the prayer quilt and falling asleep. She had me take the clock down off of the wall – the ticking was too loud for her. She asked me what I was typing. I assumed the noise might be keeping her awake, but just the opposite, she said she finds it soothing.

We are probably going to leave the hospital tomorrow. I expect we will stay at the hotel nearby for at least one more night after that. They’ve moved her down from morphine to percocet today, plus she’s still on her regular dose of trileptal. They’ll look at that in about 6 months and decide if we should cut the dosage a bit.

She is still having hallucinations, though.

She describes them as “different” than the ones that got us here. They are not accompanied by any of the feelings she had before and she is pretty sure they are not auras. In exploring it a bit more, we learned that these are typically at the periphery of field of vision, the others would have been more central.

We mentioned them to the surgery docs when they did their rounds the last 2 days (including Dr. Bingaman and Olivera) and also to the epilepsy docs and nobody was too concerned. We’d been warned about the possibility beforehand and I’m feeling pretty confident that this is just the brain adjusting to the trauma of the surgery.

They were coming pretty regularly tonight as we walked around. She’d see someone sitting in a chair and stretching, or C3P0 or an exit sigh where there were none. She said that she could easily recognize them as hallucinations and that they always went away when she looked directly at the spot. We’ll see how that all looks tomorrow and in the days to come.

Overall, though, this is all very positive and exiting. The progress she’s made from Wednesday night and Thursday to yesterday and today is night and day. Even mid-day Thursday, she’d wake for a few minutes and talk, but then be exhausted and go back to sleep. Today, she and I walked from the room to the elevator to 1st floor cafeteria and back, talking all the way, and she showed no signs of fatigue. Just night and day different.

I’m going to call it a night and get some sleep.