The Run-on Amber Milliken I was in third grade, the same year I survived my brain tumor, when my teacher's red ink scribbled "run-on sentences!" atop my short story, underlined and exclamation marked. So I copied the first sentence of a Victor Hugo novel—42 words in the first sentence (I did not know he had a longer 800-word sentence at the time). How was I supposed to tell a story within the limitations of short sentences!? My stories were deemed confusing. Associatively, I blamed my actual story as being too complex to tell, a character whose story setting was in the borderland of the world of "normalcy" and the world that chronic illness patients inhabit. I was deemed "complicated" by brilliant surgeons. Their organ of choice: the brain. My initial survivorship of a childhood brain tumor was overshadowed by the following twenty years of further operations for a secondary condition. The neat promise of a hopeful future of was a mis-promise (I dare not say lie), for my family, relationships, education, work … My life was a run-on. The few who were told my story were taken aback by the image of the person telling it. I did not look like the person who had thirteen neurological surgeries, and a few spinal ones thrown in for good measure. I looked fine as so many, including the neurosurgeons, would say. Even with the astrocytoma at eight-years-old—I looked fine despite having continual flu symptoms, headaches, vomiting sessions, and increasingly bad balance. After every surgery and procedure that followed that tumor—from cerebrospinal fluid complications—we were told that I looked fine. I couldn't even tell looking at my own school pictures over the years—my shaved head and surgeries hidden under a mop of hair. I remember how I felt in some of those photos, still in shock from the weeks previous, the vestiges of a smile tempered with residual pain, and in later years, of numbness from the narcotic pain medications. I felt like there was a massive weight on my shoulders dragging me down, that I couldn't breathe for it sagging upon me, my feet clumsy and tangled, tripping on myself sometimes as I fatigued. I felt one eye bulged out as the pressure increased behind my temples. At most, people would say I looked pale. The invisibility of my chronic illness has allowed me to hide behind that image that people perceive, in a constant flux of denial at my experience. Despite the illusion of everything being fine, most of those two decades were a struggle for us. I say "us" because a chronic illness is not merely individual—it is a family experience. The headaches and pain have scarred us more deeply than the physical scars across my body. However, my memories are blurred, while they are etched in my mother's perspective as witness. Partially from denial and my psyche's self-protection, and partially from its interweaving with narcotics. I can tell the facts of what happened—of what surgery was when. I can give you the formula that I have memorized to fill in new doctor's office forms. Please list previous surgeries here: '98 (x2); '01; '05 (x2); '06 (x4); '09; '11; '12 (x3); '14; '16 (x3). Which is misleading because of the life in-between those semicolons. Not all those surgeries and the associated suffering were created equal. It is not simply the symptoms, or the tumor, or the hydrocephalus devices implanted to regulate cerebrospinal fluid that malfunction. No, it is the experience of the battle of self in suffering. Between trying to fight through pain that returns in waves, suffocating [End Page 208] one under the pummel of the tide. Where you have to have succinct non-Hugoian answers when you come up for a gasp of air to tell your neurosurgeon not just that you are drowning, but exactly how you are drowning, or they will send you home with a MRI certified as level fine. Where you have to decide what your philosophy is on dealing with pain. The tide that I drown in is not external, but rather...