My brain surgery was just over three months ago. Let’s look at the numbers:

• Four and a half years of fretting about it
• Five hours (and counting) with my head in various MRI machines (Vandy’s are the best – 5 stars on Yelp!)
• Eleventy-six conversations with seven doctors discussing possible treatments and outcomes
• Five hours sedated in a space-age operating room (suspended upside down to let gravity pull my brain away from the tumor)
• Two days in the hospital hooked up with six different catheters and ports
• Two weeks with a headband of fifty staples
• A dozen blog posts regaling all y’all with the exciting details of my journey

Since then, I’ve spent approximately sixty-two percent of my waking hours scratching the top of my head hoping that I will get all the feeling back. It’s coming along.

This week, I had my first follow-up MRI. Getting an MRI at Vanderbilt is like working your way through a series of hospital-themed escape rooms. The first challenge is in the lobby, where you stand like an idiot trying to remember which of the six hallways fanning out in front of you leads to the lab.

Once you find it (and only because it’s in the same hallway as the bathroom), you enter your info on a tablet, then recite the exact same information to the woman behind the glass. She slaps a barcode on your wrist and sends you through a doorway into a maze of hallways straight out of Severance. As you try to decode the signs at each intersection, you pass forgotten patients strapped to gurneys and youthful coffee drinkers in scrubs and think: I wonder where they keep the goats.

Eventually you land in a second waiting room, and then a third, where you are supposed to watch TV and wait for the appropriate signal. A red herring comes in the form of a phlebotomist who ushers you into yet another room where she finds a vein and installs an IV line. She walks you back to the TV room where you wait some more.

Finally, someone new enters, checks your bar code, and leads you through another door and into a changing room. (I’m thinking I’d like to start a business selling doors to Vanderbilt. I’d make a fortune!)

You strip down, shimmy into a hospital gown and a pair of grippy socks, and try to fit your things into a strangely shaped locker. Since MRI machines wield immensely powerful magnets, you’re forbidden from having any metal on your body. (I once read of a woman who decided to exercise her second amendment rights by keeping her firearm on her body, hidden under her gown. The magnets caused it to fire, lodging a bullet in her butt. Freedom!!)

Finally, you’re led down a few more twisty hallways to the machine and tucked in with a warm blanket, earplugs, and a panic button (it can be claustrophobic). The newer Vandy machines are relatively peaceful if you can ignore 30 minutes of jackhammering all around your head. With a backlit photo of trees and sky above you and a gentle breeze on your face, you can close your eyes and pretend you’re relaxing on a beach (that is being jackhammered). If you’re good at 4-7-8 breathing, you might even be able to catch a few winks.

When it’s over, they deposit you in the change room and you’re left to fend for yourself as you work your way back through the massive maze of hallways and waiting rooms, searching desperately for exit signs.

So this week, right after I escaped the MRI, I went to see my neurologist. He’s a lovely man who seems a little sad that I chose to have the surgery elsewhere. But I have to say, he’s been dedicated to me as his patient, and I can tell he’s invested in making sure I’m doing well. I enjoy my visits with him, and not only because there’s a donut shop in the building. (Hey, good girls get a donut after their brain tumor visits.)

I must say this was a banner visit as my doctor looked at the scans and proclaimed, “There is nothing abnormal about your brain!” It’s a pretty bold statement and I’ve been thinking about it since. After all, it’s not every day that a professional tells you you’re not abnormal. I told my doctor I’m going to have it tattooed on my arm.

I will continue to have regular MRIs for a while, and a follow-up with the doctors in California. But all in all, I’m pleased. The tumor is gone and I feel great. Maybe I’ll throw myself a melon party!