Nora Vs. The Tumor and How We're Redefining "Normal"

A while ago, I wrote a little ditty about how much I love surprises. Because the Universe doesn’t differentiate the intricacies of the English language, it took me literally and delivered me a surprise that can only be described as one doozy of a humdinger.

No, not a baby left on my doorstep. Not a puppy in a basket. Not a long-lost twin that my parents had been hiding from me. Not even a squirrel jumping out of my garbage can (I expect that at this point).

Nope, not an awesome surprise. More like a surprise where your cell phone rings at noon on a Monday and it’s your boyfriend’s co-worker telling you that said boyfriend just had a seizure at work and is this normal?

The kind of surprise where a boyfriend’s seizure isn’t normal and you assume this co-worker is joking and call the front desk to ask a poor receptionist on her first day of work to verify the boyfriend was seizing. The kind of surprise where her answer is Yes and you’re racing (and beating) his ambulance to the hospital for a week-long, mind-spinning, world-upheaving, life-altering journey through the world of modern medicine.


You know, that kind of surprise.

On a normal day, I wake up and tell my boyfriend that life is a miracle. He then tells me to please go back to bed. I’m up and out the door at least an hour before he even hits snooze for the first time, but I usually wake him up one more time by shouting my love for him as I head out the door.

I say these things because I really, truly believe it in a way that I didn’t before this awesome guy crossed my path. He’s been a bright light in a happy and generally trouble-free life, even if he’s given me fine lines around my mouth and eyes from all of the hysterical laughter and uncontrollable smiling he’s forced upon me in the past year.

The same day of the Worst Surprise Ever, I ignored my incessant alarm and snoozed not once, not twice, not even three but four times, waking Aaron up each time to tell him I wanted to spend exactly nine more minutes with him and diving back into bed fully dressed to aggravate him with kisses and tell him that I loved him so much I wanted to punch him in the face.

I didn’t know that it would be my last morning of Normal, and that I’d have to redefine that word in the weeks that have come since, but whatever pulled me back to bed that morning also had the courtesy to carefully preserve those memories in crystal clear details.

Since that morning, I’ve been shown charts and graphs and images that show the inner workings of his heart and his head, but they’ve only confirmed what I already knew: that he’s got a heart that works harder than any other and a strong and resilient spirit. Luckily, those two things are contagious, so even as we wade through an endless sea of long Greek words and noisy machines, we’ve created a sense of *normal*. And no footnote is going to define our lives.

So, uh, what’s new with you guys?