(Host) Educator, writer and commentator Mary McCallum loves words. Her
recent experience with some new medical jargon affirmed her belief that
words have the power to shape how we respond to some of life’s troubling
situations.
(McCallum) Last summer, I entered an unfamiliar
world with its own lexicon. It began with the word mass, and the doctor
telling me that I had one wasn’t talking about the religious kind. This
bundle of cells had been sitting quietly next to my brain stem for
years, taking up a half inch of space and not making any trouble. Until
then. I sat on a gurney in an emergency room where I’d gone for tests,
heard the news and thought: Ah, something that happens only to other
people has just happened to me.
My state of mind clicked into
emergency mode when I heard the words mass and brain used in the same
sentence applying to me, and thus my journey into the world of advanced
medicine began. A word person all my life, I latched on and began taking
notes. The vocabulary list kept growing.
The first word I
scrawled in my notebook was delivered by a neurosurgeon after viewing
MRI images. I looked up from my hospital bed and asked, "Can you spell
that please?" "M-E-N-I-N-G-I-O-M-A," he said, and repeated the word
meningioma the way we were instructed to do in third grade spelling
bees.
"And that is?" I countered. He described a tumor, likely
benign, and similar to a cousin of sorts that’s called an acoustic
neuroma. The word benign allowed me to breathe out and slowly take in
and process his report. He spelled acoustic neuroma for me as I wrote.
Not so technical was his comparing the tumor’s shape to a small
dumbbell. Rather an ironic choice of words, I thought, and later created
a file folder on my laptop labeled Dumbbell into which I dumped all my
research about this uninvited tenant.
Tenant is exactly what a
friend named the little mass, sharing my own squeamishness about the
word tumor. And there were other euphemisms: The New Lodger, The Lurker
and The Little Knot. Such terminology helped reduce our combined stress
about a serious turn of events. At a social gathering, I met a woman who
had in her head what I have in mine, and we instantly bonded and
exchanged email addresses. Over the course of months, I received updates
about her successful treatment signed, "Your tumor-ish friend." We
shared a special dark lingo.
In the end, I was one of the lucky
ones. My dizzy vertiginous state was unrelated to the tumor. It was
likely caused by a virus, and would probably disappear over time. The
mass was an incidental finding that surfaced through testing for other
things. The uninvited tenant can stay so long as it doesn’t grow. I now
share something with 10,000 others diagnosed nationwide each year with
benign meningioma. Even Sheryl Crow has one. The words benign and
incidental finding fell as music upon my ears. I carry them within me
like a mantra, powerful reminders of how one’s universe can change in a
moment by a word or two.