My mom and dad were already in the waiting room when we got there. I checked in, changed into a couple of johnnies, one with the opening in the back, the other in the front. I knew the drill. Cold snaps against my skin. Hospital bracelet.
I hopped up on a gurney behind a curtain and took off my helmet. Someone had left a thick folder of papers on the table, my medical records, and I flipped through them feeling like a snoop. I jumped when my family pushed back the curtain. “Hi!” I said, too loudly, and slapped the folder shut.
A nurse came by and said it was time to go. I asked to use the bathroom first, gathered up my gowns, and snapped my helmet back on. “Okay, so, um, be right back,” I said brightly. I started toward the hallway, but my dad touched my arm and pulled me in close. “It’s okay,” he whispered in my ear, “this is a big deal.”
“I know,” I said, my voice catching.
“I know,” he said back.
Eli came with me to right outside the OR, and the neurosurgeon met us there. “Now, there is a possibility that we won’t be able to place the prosthesis today.”
“What?”
Apparently there could be trouble pulling apart the tissues. Without my skull to keep them separate, my forehead and the outermost dura surrounding my brain had likely fused. If separating them took too long, they’d have to go back in with the prosthesis another time.
“When you see me in recovery, will you tell me right away if my head is back?”
“Sure,” the doctor said. “But it’s likely you won’t be with it enough to remember.” I was told before each surgery that I wouldn’t remember the recovery room, but I always did.
“Please, just tell me right away,” I said. “Will I see the plastic surgeon before we begin?”
“No, he won’t be here until later. His job comes in at the end.”
• • •
I awoke in the recovery room with the neurosurgeon standing over me.
“You did fine.”
“Do I have my head back?”
“What’s that?”
“My head. Is it back?”
He smiled. “Yes. Yes, it’s back.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
I was moved to a room and Eli came in as soon as they let him.
“Jess, your head is back,” he said, first thing, in case I hadn’t yet heard. I reached out and squeezed his arms and cupped my hands around his face. I just wanted to touch him.
“I know.” I laughed. “The doctor told me. How do I look?”
“Like a person with a head,” Eli said. “Looks great, lady.”
We did it, I thought. It’s over. I asked for a mirror so that I could see myself before the swelling set in. Yep, I was a person with a head. I swept my eyes over the face staring back at me. My forehead was in place, my eyebrows level. Something was off, though. My left temple. A golf-ball-sized dent was still there. I reached up to touch it and traced my finger along the now-complete eye socket. The edge of the bone felt unnaturally sharp where it dropped off into my hollow temple.
“Eli,” I said, “my temple. Does it look not quite filled in to you?” He tipped my chin up with his fingers and stared at me, his mouth a straight line.
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell right now. Could be that the surrounding area is already beginning to swell, and that’s why it looks that way.”
“Right,” I said. “Is the plastic surgeon still here? I haven’t seen him. I want to thank him.”
Eli looked suddenly tired. “He didn’t show up.”
It took me a second before I could speak. “What do you mean?”
No one could say exactly what had happened or where the communication had broken down. A month later, at a follow-up visit, I would ask the secretary about it, and she’d say that she had made a mistake. That was all.
The neurosurgeon pointed out that it was impossible to know what, if anything, might have been different if the plastic surgeon had been there. Temporal wasting is common following craniotomies. Detached from the bone for so many months, the temporalis muscle atrophies. My doctor was right, of course. In an alternate universe where both surgeons were present, maybe something goes terribly wrong and I never make it off the table. But maybe, with the plastic surgeon there, I wake up all the way intact.
• • •
My mother stayed with us again for the first week of my recovery. I hung around the house for a few days, mostly because that was what I thought I was supposed to do. The truth was, I felt great. Which is to say, like a healthy person recovering from surgery. I’d never been that before.
I’d been home for four days when my mother and I decided to walk over to the farmers’ market on campus. My first real helmet-free outing. I tied a navy blue bandana over my scar and pulled it awkwardly down over the remaining dent in my temple. I felt naked and self-conscious without my helmet, vulnerable, though my brain was better protected now than it had been in almost a year.
We cut through the park on our way to the market, and when we passed a game of ultimate Frisbee, my body switched into high alert. I instinctively moved to the far side of the path to give myself an extra second or two to react should an errant Frisbee glide uncomfortably close. I’d forgotten that I now had a skull to protect me.
We wandered among the stalls piled with tomatoes and zucchini, tiny raspberries, corn. We filled our bags. My mother bought a thyme plant for my kitchen window, a scoop of cherry lambic sorbet for me, and coffee ice cream for herself. We sat down on the steps of a building in Harvard Yard. I’d accepted a teaching fellowship for the semester and would walk into the classroom in three weeks. There was a lot to do before then.
“I want to bake something,” I said.
I hadn’t dared to say it out loud, but before leaving for the hospital, I had secretly challenged myself to bake challah my first week home. After my first surgeries, it had taken me months to regain the strength to produce the two braided loaves. If I could be well enough to bake challah this time after only one week, it would be proof that I was well on my way.
I started baking bread when I was in middle school. A friend of my mother’s gave me a bread machine, and I used it to make terrible whole wheat bricks from bagged flour mixes. The thing that the manual called the baking pan was actually more of a bucket, a vertically oriented rectangle with a dough hook that snapped into place on the bottom. What came out were not so much loaves but towers that you would have to pry from the “pan,” tearing a hole in the bottom where the dough hook had baked into the bread after the kneading cycle. We ate it warm with butter, and at least butter is nice.
After Eli and I were married, I tried bread baking again, this time doing everything by hand. I baked challah every Friday for Shabbat dinners, and before long I had it down. My hands worked and shaped the dough as if on automatic.
I adjusted my bandana as my mom and I stood up to go, and smoothed the hair on the top of my head. It was warm from the sun. I have a luxury head, I thought. At home I had everything I needed: flour, salt, yeast, oil, honey, eggs. That dent was just a battle wound. It was time to get on with it.
Five-Fold Challah
For years, the challah I baked was fine. Not great, though I was convinced it was. That’s because we always ate it super fresh, still warm from the oven, when all breads, even so-so ones, taste like something special. Once cooled, and certainly by the next day, the bread would be just okay. Its flavor would flatten out and the texture would go a bit crumbly and stiff.
This challah is different, thanks to a tip from my friend Andrew Janjigian, a baker and editor at Cook’s Illustrated magazine. Instead of kneading the dough, he said, try folding it. Then stash it in the fridge for a long, slow rise. With this technique, the gluten develops beautifully. The crumb is elastic and light, and the loaf pulls apart in fluffy wisps like cotton candy. The flavor is deep, almost buttery, thou
gh it’s made with olive oil. And it’s just as good on day two.
While this recipe takes a day or so from start to finish, it needs your attention for only a minute here and there over the first couple of hours. Then you leave the dough alone until you’re ready to shape and bake it. I start the dough before dinner a night in advance, then go about my business at home, popping into the kitchen whenever it’s time to fold.
I’ve included weight measures for the liquid ingredients here, because I’ve found it to be the simplest way to measure them for this particular recipe. With sticky, clingy things like honey and oil, it’s fastest when you can measure directly into the bowl.
Please note that this recipe calls for instant dry yeast, not active dry yeast. Andrew explained to me the difference: Active dry yeast is coated with a layer of dead yeast that must be dissolved in order for the yeast to activate. That’s why you have to proof it. Instant dry yeast, on the other hand, is all viable yeast. It’s easier to use because there’s no need to dissolve it in liquid. You just add it to your dry ingredients, and you’re off. It’s all I ever keep around. I buy the big red, white, and blue sacks of SAF-Instant yeast, which you can find online and in some grocery stores. Fleischmann’s makes two instant yeasts, BreadMachine Yeast and Rapid-Rise Yeast, that are widely available in stores.
Dry ingredients:
4 cups (500 grams) bread flour
1½ teaspoons instant dry yeast
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
Wet ingredients:
2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk (save the extra white in a covered glass in the fridge for glazing later on)
¾ cup (190 grams) water
⅓ cup (75 grams) olive oil
¼ cup (85 grams) honey
For sprinkling, before baking (optional):
Flaxseeds
Rolled oats
Sunflower seeds
Pumpkin seeds
Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl. Dump the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until a wet, sticky dough forms. Cover the bowl with plastic and let sit for 10 minutes.
Peel back the plastic. Grab an edge of the dough, lift it up, and fold it over itself to the center. Turn the bowl a bit and repeat around the entire lump of dough, grabbing an edge and folding it into the center, eight turns, grabs, and folds in all. Then flip the dough so that the folds and seams are on the bottom. Cover tightly again with the plastic, and let sit for 30 minutes.
Repeat the all-around folding, flipping, covering, and resting for 30 minutes four more times. (I keep track by drawing hash marks in permanent marker right on the plastic.) The dough flops more than it folds in the first round or two. Then, as the gluten develops, you’ll get proper folds. By the final fold, the dough will be wonderfully elastic, and you’ll be able to see and feel the small pockets of air within. Pull the plastic tight again over the bowl and refrigerate for 16 to 24 hours.
Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and divide into six equal pieces. Roll into six strands, about a foot long and ¾ inch in diameter, dusting sparingly with flour when necessary to prevent sticking. (You’ll want to add as little extra flour as possible.) Form two three-strand braids, and transfer the loaves to the prepared pan. Cover with plastic and let proof at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours, until the dough is noticeably swollen and puffed and bounces back very slowly, if at all, when you poke it lightly with your finger.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Remove the plastic from the loaves and brush with the reserved egg white. If you’d like, sprinkle with seeds. Poppy and sesame seeds are traditional challah toppings. I typically cover one with a combination of flaxseeds and rolled oats, and the other with sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, though lately I’ve been opting for no seeds at all.
Bake for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the bread is golden and gorgeous and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. You can also check for doneness with a thermometer. The internal temperature of the loaves will be 190 degrees when fully baked.
Transfer to racks and let cool.
Makes 2 loaves.
CHAPTER 30
Don’t Look
I was grateful when the semester began. It had been a strange four weeks since the surgery. I hadn’t known what to do with myself, so it felt good to be back in an environment that prescribed my next steps for me: Pass out syllabi. Grade papers. Meet with students. I started my dissertation. I attended lectures and organized seminars. Sometimes, I’d mindlessly go to hang my finger on the strap of the helmet I was no longer wearing, and my hand would thump to the desk below. This is me, getting on with it, I’d tell myself. This is what I am supposed to be doing.
Every morning I’d inspect my head and my face, looking for improvement. Is my scar a bit flatter? Has the swelling gone down? How is the bruising? One by one, the signs of surgery disappeared. The dent in my head did not. It was an odd effect. I didn’t look sick anymore. Just deformed. This was my face now.
Don’t look. It doesn’t matter. I turned away from the mirror when I brushed my teeth. Don’t look. But sometimes I did. I’d glide my fingers gently down into my scooped-out temple and tickle the soft skin. If I pressed at all, it hurt. The spot was tender like a bruise. I looked at the top of my head. After the initial surgery to clip the aneurysm, my scar had been barely visible, a thin, straight line tucked neatly beneath my hair. But now my head had been opened twice more along that same seam, my scalp stretched repeatedly back into place and stitched closed. I had a landing strip, a half-inch band of permanent baldness across the top of my head. These things were not going away.
That there was nothing left to be done was supposed to be a good thing. Now the sense of finality had been turned upside down. There was nothing left to be done, all right. They’d fixed what could be fixed. I shouldn’t complain, I told myself. The dent was in the squishy part of my temple and didn’t pose a threat to my brain. The protective part of my skull was fully intact. My helmet sat in our bedroom closet on a shelf so high I couldn’t reach it without a ladder. But the surgery hadn’t felt like the end point I’d expected.
I went over and over the conversations with doctors and secretaries in my mind, trying to figure out what I could have done—what I should have done—to make sure the plastic surgeon was there. I had tried to be vigilant, smart, careful, polite, thorough, responsible, good. How could something have gone wrong again?
My doctors and friends liked to tell me how, even with the remaining dent, it was soooo much better than before. But really? Was that the bar? Was a skull that looked as though it had been attacked by a killer melon baller really all we had hoped to surpass?
I wanted to punch myself in the face for thinking these things. If I were more grateful, less shallow, stronger, wiser, if I had my priorities straight, if I had learned anything at all about what really matters from the previous year, if I were a better person, this stupid little defect would mean nothing to me. Maybe then I could look in the mirror and see my face, and not a reminder of my own near-death, my own brokenness, screaming back at me. I was healthy and helmet free. I was given the green light to run again. To have children. I was back in school. My brain was clean, the aneurysm gone. What was wrong with me, getting all worked up about a dent the size of a golf ball?
I called my dad. He said my feelings weren’t about the remaining defect, not really, and he was right. They were about the whole long slog of it coming to an end, about having no more next steps, no upcoming tests or surgeries to keep me looking ahead and looking forward to becoming well again, bit by bit. There were no more bits. This was me, all patched up. I felt as though I’d been on a bus for thousands of miles, then dropped, alone, at the end of a dusty highway. I hadn’t arrived anywhere at all, but there wa
s nowhere left to go. What had happened to me? What the hell had happened to me? “You had to feel it sometime, Jess,” my dad said. I didn’t understand what he meant. Hadn’t I been feeling it all along? Wasn’t this the part where I was supposed to not have to feel it anymore?
Stop it. Just stop it. Stop crying. You’re fine. I would will myself out of this: I had a weird-looking face. So what? I’d never been beauty oriented, anyway. All my life, I’d assumed it had to be one or the other. You were pretty or you were smart. You cared about looks or the important stuff.
Eli didn’t believe me when I said the dent was no big deal. Even I didn’t believe me. But, each in our own way, we pretended that we did. We wanted so badly for it to be true that everything was okay. If we could just stand back, keep quiet, and let time do its thing, shrinking and squeezing all that had happened into a mere blip in the larger context of a long and healthy life. If we could just hold tight.
Health. Family. Work. These were the things that mattered. I lunged for them. I shoved my nose into the yellowed pages of nineteenth-century books and newspapers. I wrote a paper. I translated texts. I did yoga and lifted weights. I started running again, too, though I feared it. Eli came with me, at first. We started slowly, running, then walking, then running again, as much as I could take. Soon, we were counting the miles. Each bridge along the Charles was a finish line: JFK, Western Avenue, River Street, BU. Sometimes panic would claw itself out of the box where I kept it and swipe at my heels. I’d notice an itch on my scalp and scan the trail to see who might come to my rescue if I collapsed. The couple on the bench. The man with the dog. That girl on the grass has her cell phone out. She could make the call.
Stir Page 20