Brain Surgery

by Teresa Swartz Roberts

Blog post 64 Copyright 2026

Brain surgery

I don’t think it really hit me that I’m having brain surgery until the day before the surgical consultation for my Deep Brain Stimulation procedure. Brain surgery! I like saying it. I have heard people complain, “It’s not brain surgery!” This time it is. Literally. As much as I believe in appreciation of different types of knowledge, I would say the smartest person in any room would be the brain surgeon. At least one would hope. (I never use “one” in this way. I’m using it now because that’s how I talk fancy.)

If I’m going to consult with a brain surgeon, I need to talk fancy. I need to think fancy. I’m following the same philosophy that Big and Loud therapies do. You have to think big if you’re going to move big. And you have to think loud if you’re going to talk loud. That’s what got me thinking about how I spend my brain power.

In the year since My Honey passed away I’ve spent most of my widowhood in front of a TV screen. I have practiced my religion every day. I have read a little bit every day. I have talked to at least one human being every day. And I have exercised every day. But I have not wanted to think. Not really.

So sometimes I use my screen time to watch — or rather rewatch – a show from my youth. I don’t have to dig up any brain cells unless I want to. I’m pretty sure it’s the secret behind the longevity of Who’s the Boss? It’s pretty much the same when I watch a competition reality show that isn’t intellectual. Think “The Big ‘Nailed It!’ Baking Challenge.” When I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I’m not going back to sleep, I sometimes opt for the laugh-tracked sitcom and other times I opt for the technical science fiction or the complicated police procedural, something that taxes my brain and forces me to figure things out. Does that count as thinking time?

Almost all of my sentences begin with, “I was watching such and such the other day …” So I guess I’m getting something from what I’m seeing on the screen. Someone asked me if I could tell anything about myself by what was in my queue to watch in the future. My answer is I don’t want to look. My list looks pretty highbrow but that’s because it’s the stuff I haven’t been watching. I got through the new season of Stranger Things in about a day and a half, but Wuthering Heights has been in my queue forever.

The major argument for not watching Netflix or Disney plus is the time they cost. Every hour that I spend watching something or scrolling is an hour I’m not spending doing something else, which is an argument that IRmade to my son when he was a child. It probably feels impossible to give a child screen limits these days.  My care-giver friend and I watched Wicked and realized that neither of us had read the original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum. So we checked one out of the library, and I read it aloud as part of my speech therapy. That felt good. I need to do more of that. The practice will help me talk fancy.

Am I going to be able to talk fancy after the surgery? There is a risk that I may not be able to. The surgery sometimes affects the speech and language centers of the brain and slows  thinking. I believe I can overcome any disability left by the operation and have a better quality of life than I have now. It’s scary that there may be a serious side effect from the treatment. But it’s also scary that when I took my cognitive assessment I couldn’t create a significant list of words that begin with the letter S. I’ve examined those moments over and over and realized that I was hungry and tired by then. I was off. When I’m off, it’s hard to form words. It’s hard to form thoughts. The thoughts are still there, but they need to be wrangled.

I am setting a goal. I’m going to use more time doing something other than watching TV. I will make allowances for watching videos on YouTube that are educating me about the pyramids or about the operation I’m getting ready to have. And if there’s a new season of Doctor Who, I’ll probably watch it more than once. (Life is meant to be enjoyed, after all.) But maybe I’ll assign myself to write a review of it. Or maybe I will try some fan fiction. I just need to get my brain working again. It should be easy…like brain surgery.