'Exotic', 'fluffy' twist . . . I get to grow old

In true B Grade drama style, an 'exotic', 'fluffy' twist which would make me turn the channel because the plot is now so preposterous . . . we heard last night neither benign, nor malignant.

We had thought the best case scenario was the word 'benign' , and I had readied myself for the rough road of chemo and all that other ugly stuff . . . with a broad grin neurosurgeon Mr Danks announced (and I will try my best to use direct quotes): "I have good news - the pathology results tell us it's not a tumour, well, let's qualify that with 95 per cent sure it's not a tumour".
(... though I do hate that 95 per cent stuff after being in the 5 per cent category for CSF leakage post lumbar puncture)

In fact, many of the cells in the mass that Mr Danks and his team went in and excavated last Thursday are 'foamy' or macrophage cells - the body's own little security guards that go in and tackle invaders. Their presence means a whole new ballgame.

According to Ross and Wilson's Anatomy and Physiology, these cells will "bind, engulf and digest foreign cells or particles".

What they're attacking, we don't know yet, and this is where it gets intriguing: the pathology people are testing over the next two weeks for a range of 'exotics'.

Apparently there's a good chance I've been carrying around some brain infection since my first travels in Asia - back in 91. It could also be that I've carried around some hitchhiker parasite deep in there behind my right eye for 18 years too.

All of it makes more interesting the fact that I had a fever for a week before that first epileptic episode in Hong Kong ... and was it really dysentary in Calcutta?

Me, shellshocked, asked how this 'exotic' infection theory is better news than a tumour.

His words, to the best of my recollection: "because tumours kill people, infections in the modern day do not".

Once they define what this lodger is, it gets an eviction notice and a dose of something and it's gone.

... and I get to grow old.

My mother, perhaps for that moment forgetting that I was just six days out of surgery, gave an embrace to test thoracics were still sturdy and showed her best restraint in not leaping across the room to hug the surgeon.

I see him again in two weeks - by which time hopefully they have a name for the infection/parasite, and a good dose of Roundup for this weed.

A nurse then removed my staples - with me looking like some marsupial on the Hume caught in Roadtrain headlights.

Emma's still pretty sure that I was abducted by aliens who inserted a foetus by anal probe and the planet's colonisation by neon glowing walruses is about to begin when this thing wakes up and crawls out my eye socket . . . and she knows it only hurts when I laugh.

Later this week there'll be a three-storey bonfire in Red Hill to celebrate beneath the stars - and while I'm not yet able to do cartwheels, I'll be stomping my very best 'Where The Wild Things Are' dance around it.


... and I heard somewhere, from some 1970s road movie perhaps, that 'chicks dig scars', right?