I Had a Pounding Headache. My Life Changed After a CT Scan

When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

Over the years, I have been asked this question countless times. I have listened to other authors give some version of similar answers: they just always knew they wanted to tell stories for a living.

Well, not me. For me, writing wasn’t something I wanted to do—it just became part of the fabric of who I am. I wrote stories. I read them. I wrote as if my life depended on it, but it wasn’t until I discovered competitive boxing that my life shifted from being someone who wrote to being a professional author.

Yes, I was already in college for writing. I’d started as a journalism major and swiftly felt boxed in by the facts and rules. I wanted to stretch and play, so I shifted to creative writing. I minored in psychology. I let stories pour out of me. I have always been prolific, and it felt like a creative exorcism every time I would sit down to create.

At the time, I was a freshman in college, and I loved two things: boxing and writing. Well, and boys. Lots and lots of boys.

I was good at boxing. I discovered martial arts when I was a teenager, though I’d grown up on a healthy diet of Friday night fights and boxing championships. I could rattle off a list of who was who in the fighting community, and I even became a sports journalist for a while.

During that time, I was preparing to compete in my first boxing competition. I was nervous. I’d been an athlete for my whole life, but I could never quite tame my nerves. Not in gymnastics, or soccer, or dance, or track. During a sparring session one evening, I got popped in the eye, which was a pretty normal occurrence.

It wasn’t until a sucking, pounding headache overtook the entire left side of my head that I knew something was wrong. I started cataloging other nagging issues I’d been ignoring: headaches, a bit of dizziness, a rapid pulse. I brushed it off until my coach told me I needed to go get looked at.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said. “Probably just overtraining.”

So I went.

There are those moments in hospital rooms that people talk about: an unexpected diagnosis. A death sentence. Good news, even. For me, my life changed after one CT scan, when they called to deliver the results. I will never forget the urgency in the technician’s voice.

“You have a three-and-a-half-inch mass on the left parietal lobe of your brain that’s on the verge of hemorrhaging. You need to come in for an MRI immediately.”

All I could think about was how big three inches was and the fact that I didn’t know where the left parietal lobe of my brain even was. Plus, didn’t a mass mean cancer?

In all my ignorance, I could only focus on one thing: boxing. I loved it. I was never not going to love it. So what did this mean for me then? Was this because of boxing? Had I done this to myself?

Over the coming days, I was pumped full of drugs and dyes. I was poked and prodded while waiting in agony for results. They weren’t good. It seemed, in all my competitive haste, that if I had gotten hit even one more time, I was dead.

The mass, a benign arachnoid cyst, was on the verge of rupturing. So, though it wasn’t cancer, if I fell down and bonked my head on the way home, I was a goner anyway. Suddenly, cancer wasn’t looking like the worst option—never boxing again seemed like a fate worse than death.

I loved it as much as writing, if not more.

During spring break, I got brain surgery. In a nutshell: when I was young, my arachnoid membranes split and filled with fluid. Maybe from being a gymnast, a boxer, or perhaps it was just one of those genetic things.

The cyst grew so large, it compressed my brain completely flat on the left side. My skull was as thin as an eggshell. They sliced me open, removed my brittle skull, and plopped it into a bowl. The cyst was situated around an aggravated vein and ruptured when they removed it—luckily, not in my head.

My brain puffed back to normal size. They replaced my skull, screwed in four rather large titanium plates and sixteen screws, closed me up with forty-two staples, and wheeled me to the ICU.

That was my first surgery.

They had not prepared me for what would come after: the holes in my forehead from the drills to keep my head steady during surgery, the hair that would fall out from the horrible scar, the reality that the cyst could grow back, the fact that I could have an aneurysm, and how my entire life now felt unsteady without a sport I loved or a family close by.

A week later, I was back in school, and like so many tough times before, I began to write in order to make sense of what just happened.

The seeds of what would become my first novel took root. Looking back, that novel about a woman who abandons her children to pursue competitive boxing, only to get slowed down by a brain tumor, was like most first novels: too close to home.

No, I was not a mother, but as I wrote about this fictitious character, I realized it was a way to cope with the trauma of what I’d just been through.

That book landed itself a home when I was 22. It was not with a good publisher, but it seemed I had wedged my foot into the door of an industry I so desperately wanted to be a part of, but knew so little about.

So, it was only after my publishing experience went sour that I decided to learn. I began to study the industry once I graduated college and entered the real world. True to form, I was back in the boxing ring shortly after surgery but soon found I wanted to protect my brain more than ever, so sadly, I hung up my gloves.

It has now been 23 years since that surgery. Twenty-three years of having these titanium reminders in my head. Years and years of follow-up MRIs. Even now, my head tingles when there’s a fire or a thunderstorm. And my hair never grew back across that white, jagged scar.

Because of that experience, I chose to take the risk to pursue life as an author. It hasn’t been easy or linear, but it has been a lot less scary than getting brain surgery. I still remember them wheeling me back to the operating room. They told me to say goodbye to my family. I was terrified, but mostly I remember thinking: “This will make for a hell of a story one day.”

Now, I tell stories for a living, and I help other people tell theirs.

Would I have gotten here another way? Maybe. Or maybe not.

But now, when someone asks me how long I’ve wanted to be a writer, or when, I think of the therapy of writing, the process of writing, the channeling that happens through writing, and how it always helps me work through something—even when I don’t know exactly what that something is.

And I realize: we are all creators, but sometimes we forget. We forget to process, ruminate, put the phones down, and pick up a pen—or a paintbrush, or instrument. To walk for the sake of walking. To look up. To think about our lives and all that’s happened without turning it into bite-size content for someone else to consume. To go after what we want, while we still want it. To take giant leaps into the unknown, to trust ourselves. To show up. To really show up.

To step all the way into the proverbial ring.

Rea Frey is the award-winning author of several domestic suspense, women’s fiction, and nonfiction books. Her novel, In Every Life, is forthcoming from Harper Muse in August. Known as The Book Doula, Rea helps writers birth their stories into the world.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

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