Since kindergarten, I've always had bangs, no matter what the hairstyle. My mother told me that with my large forehead, I would always need them. The bangs, which capped off my signature short, spiky hairstyle, made me feel more like a lovely lady and less like a tomboy.
I needed some kind of distinctive spunk to help me deal with an epilepsy diagnosis at age 22 and having to take medication for the rest of my life. But when my driver's license was suspended at age 37 due to a seizure-related car accident, I was suddenly dependent on my husband, Mark, just to buy a gallon of milk.
For the first time in 15 years, I felt controlled by this enemy inside me—but I was not going to let it win.
Two decades after I had tested recall skills in soldiers who had served in the Persian Gulf War as a neuropsychometrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, I found myself taking many of those same memory tests in order to have a right temporal lobectomy—a surgery that I hoped would stop my seizures altogether and allow me to regain my independence.
I wasn't afraid of the operation. In fact, I was impatient. A week before the surgery, a team of neurologists placed electrodes into my brain to induce and monitor my seizures. If the seizures originated from the same spot, the doctors said, that section could be removed. After a week in the hospital, the doctors were able to confirm that my seizures were all coming from the right temporal lobe.
One week before the operation, Mark and I sat in the surgeon's office and peppered him with questions. I wanted to know everything, even details of the brain incisions and deletions. The surgeon was happy to answer all of my questions—including the one that sounded vain.
"Do you really have to shave my head?" I asked midway through the conversation, tears running down my face. I couldn't believe it. Was I really more concerned about losing my hair than how my brain functioned?
The doctor confirmed my worst fears. "We can't have any hair in the way of the electrodes or the incision."
"But do you have to shave all of it?" I tried to explain why my bangs were so important to me, how they had become part of my identity after all these years.
"I'll see what I can do, but I can't guarantee anything," he said.
The first surgery involved implanting electrodes inside both sides of my brain to pinpoint the exact location of the seizures. During the second operation a week later, the surgeons removed a tiny part of the right temporal lobe and took out the electrodes.
When I woke from the final four-hour surgery, the doctor handed me a small mirror. I saw the skin of my ear first, then moved the mirror to look at my face, and caught a glimpse of dark brown above my eyes.
"We couldn't save it all, but look," my surgeon said. "We saved your bangs!"
Sure enough, there they were, lying on their own above the white gauze bandage across my wide forehead. Otherwise I was completely bald.
"Yes, you did." I smiled. "You are a wonderful surgeon, but you are not a hair stylist," I teased, as he and my husband and I all laughed, just hours after a life-changing operation.
As my hair grew back, I wore my favorite beret and visited my hair stylist every three weeks to trim the fuzz so it grew in evenly. Three months later, I was more than my old self again: my spiky, upbeat hairstyle was back with bangs intact—and my seizures were a thing of the past.
It's now been six years since I've had a seizure. All that remains is a curved scar on the right side of my scalp—a proud reminder that I have my freedom and my life back.