A contribution by Maria McCutchen, author of “It’s All in Your Head – A Life of Mental Fogginess And Physical Pain”
Battling health problems takes a lot out of anyone. You don’t feel well, your body isn’t working at its optimum, and your energy has sunk to its lowest. Before you know it, your body feels like a stranger’s body; one that you don’t recognize. It can all be too much for the mind to handle.
After battling severe medical issues myself, I was right there. There were plenty of days when I wanted to give up. I wanted it all to just be over. I had to find a way to keep going. I just knew that I had more life in me somewhere, and I felt like I had a purpose I still had to fulfill. One, no, two of those purposes were my two boys. I knew I had to be here for them.
After being diagnosed with a rare brain disorder, I lived through some really dark days. Doctors didn’t want to listen, they didn’t want to believe, and they didn’t try to help me. The lack of medical attention I received from a number of physicians caused a snowball effect that would send me into a world of hurt. While the doctors wanted to deny me medical treatment, my cyst grew. It grew and gained momentum; squishing my brain and drowning out my common sense, my ability to reason and think, and my ability to function as a normal person.
After months of begging for help and receiving none, I began to think I may never receive help. I was battling doctors who claimed they knew all about brain cysts – what they cause and don’t cause. I was completely alone in my belief that this large, water-filled sack was the cause of all my frightening and unnerving symptoms.
With no help on the horizon, I began to think that I was going to have to spend my last days on this earth, confused and in a fog. All I wanted, was for it all to be over. I wanted peace, and rest, and to be pain-free. I began dreaming of being out of my misery on a regular basis; it consumed my thoughts. That is, until one day my boys asked me if I was dying.
It was those few words; the reality of what they thought was happening to me, and the fear in their voices as they asked me if I was going to be here for them, or if I was dying, that brought me back to reality. Granted, it was a new reality, that now I had to fight for my life – for them. But it became my quest. When before, I couldn’t picture myself living this way anymore, suddenly I couldn’t picture or imagine my children being motherless. I couldn’t picture them growing up alone, without a mom. I had to fight back. I made a promise to myself and to them, that I would always fight.
I was on a new mission, and that mission was to find a doctor who understood brain cysts and knew how to help me. I began to shift my focus from wanting to give up – not wanting to fight, and envisioning it all just being over, to envisioning a light at the end of the tunnel. I began envisioning relief – not from ending my life, but relief from medical treatment.
I had a new vision and purpose to focus on; one that entailed my children growing up with their mother here with them, rather than alone and motherless. I had to find a way to make that a reality. So with my new mission at the forefront of my mind, I put my own suffering into perspective and began to dig for help and answers. My new focus was what I needed to give me strength to get through just one more day, one more hour and one more minute.
Today, when I have bad days from the medical conditions I’ve been left to battle, I look at my boys and I remember my promise. When I sink to my old, dark corners in my mind, tired of battling with my body and brain, I go back in my mind to that day and remember the pain I felt when my boys asked if I were going to die. And to me, that is a greater pain than any pain I could live with, physically. They are the greatest of any reason to keep trying, to pursue and persevere.
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It’s All in Your Head – A Life of Mental Fogginess And Physical Pain
by Maria McCutchen
Maria McCutchen did not have time to be sick. With a husband who had just lost a job, two young sons, and a cross-country move on the horizon, who had time to be sick? Maria didn’t have time for a common cold, let alone a major medical condition. But one day while shopping in the grocery store where she had shopped hundreds of times before, she couldn’t find the milk. It was then she knew what she was feeling was more than just stress or exhaustion. There was something very wrong.
After consulting a few doctors, Maria discovered she had a rare brain cyst known as a posterior fossa arachnoid cyst—a very large brain cyst. Hearing these cysts were normally asymptomatic was of little comfort, especially because she felt her mind and body slipping away more and more every day. Normal mental and physical functions were becoming harder to control. Even if the doctors didn’t believe the cyst was a problem, she knew it was.
It would take months of living inside a shell of a person that she’d become, months of living in a mental fogginess and sometimes even physical pain, before she would finally get the medical attention she needed. It’s All in Your Head chronicles her harrowing medical odyssey and her attempts to regain some sort of semblance of her old life after treatment.
