No Longer Scared

<p>Wet hair drapes down the back of my neck, a curtain of dark brown descending from its mat on the flat spot of my head, just above the place where skull joins spinal cord. When it's wet like this, my scar shows clearly: a natural curved part in my hair, a red line carved into the white of my scalp. It's been eleven months and two days since it was stapled back together for the last time. I stood and stared at it in the hotel bathroom mirror, still foggy from my shower. A girl looked back at me, a white towel wrapped around her body, the end tucked in under her left armpit to hold it in place. She had mascara under her eyes, black smudges clinging to her face after minimal success with a bar of soap named after a Mexican grain. Her jaw was set in a poker face, her eyes unreadable, she was neither empty nor full. She looked back at me as if to say, "we've done our best. The rest is out of our hands."

Climbing into bed with a pen and my trusty green notebook, I cannot help but thinking of the last time I stayed here: frightened and determined, awaiting surgery. It was cold that night, January twentieth, but tonight, just shy of a year later, the air is warm; warm for a Minnesota December, at least. The Courtyard Marriott in Rochester is across the street from St. Marys Hospital, where I spent the longest, hardest and most formative eight days of my life. I watched it as we passed by, remembering the early morning when we scurried as fast as we could to the other side, no idea what we were in for. I'm not scared tonight like I was the night before that morning. The alarm I set for five thirty tomorrow morning will bring only the pain of bleary eyes and a pin prick to the inside of my right elbow.

I look at my wrists, the backs of my hands, to see the difference a year has made to their scars - what were once dark red scabs are now nothing more than silver circles ringed by brown. The place where a vice held my head looks today like a slight horizontal line, barely distinguishable from a wrinkle. No, it is not courage or bravery I need tomorrow, it's luck and a willingness to give myself over to whomever is in charge of these decisions. I've been seizure-free since I was rolled out of the operating room on the afternoon of January twenty fourth, two thousand and ten. It was a day I never thought would happen; a year I never dreamed possible. So tomorrow morning I return to the first scene: the check-in desk in the Gonda Building of The Mayo Clinic.

The doctors told me that if I made it a year seizure-free, I would have a ten percent chance of ever having another seizure. So far I haven't had a single one. Tomorrow, an EEG will determine whether or not there's still seizure activity in my brain; if there's not, I'll be able to get off another medication, leaving me with just one. If there is... But here's the thing: the past year has changed me; I'm a different woman from the one who first walked into that white marble atrium. Today, I'm happy, I'm in love, I'm free. Today, I'm no longer a girl and I'm no longer scared. I pray to God that I leave Mayo with good news, but even if I don't, I'll leave as a butterfly broke free of her cocoon to be part of the world.