My mom acted like my brain surgery wasn't a big deal. I'm thankful for it.

• When I was 9 years old, I started experiencing seizures. 
• I was first diagnosed with epilepsy, but it turned out I had a tumor in my brain. 
• My mom hid from me how much of a big deal brain surgery was, and I'm thankful for it. 

My first major crisis in life happened to me a bit earlier than it does most. When I was 9 years old, I started experiencing seizures. At first, the seizures were brief and involved disorientation, tuning out of my surroundings, and mild involuntary movement — like suddenly standing up if I was sitting. After I told my mother about these strange and recurring "incidents" (as we referred to them early on), I went to a neurologist who diagnosed me with epilepsy.

It turned out to be something else

For months, I took daily pills meant to lessen the seizures, but over time, my condition worsened. The seizures became even more frequent and severe, occasionally causing me to completely lose consciousness and pass out — which often happened at school.

Things finally took a turn after an MRI scan revealed that the real cause of my epileptic seizures was a brain tumor, and surgery was the only way to remove it. From that point on, my life — and subsequently, also my parents' lives — revolved around the preparation for the surgery, which consisted of many months of frequent hospital visits that involved various examinations, several days of video EEG monitoring, and nearly 10 MRI brain scans.

This was before the age of tablets and smartphones, so every hospital visit, my mother and I had to come up with new ways to pass the time while waiting for my appointments.

I was actually glad to learn that a brain tumor was responsible for my condition because at least a tumor could be removed, while epilepsy may never go away, and I was looking forward to getting rid of the seizures for good.

My mom downplayed the severity of my brain surgery

As for the surgery itself, I didn't really worry about it. Or, more correctly, I wasn't given a reason to worry about it because at no point did my mother allow me to think it was that big a deal in the first place.

Whenever we talked about it, with or without doctors present, I wasn't told of all the things that could potentially go wrong. You just go in, they remove the tumor, no school for a month or two for recovery, and that's that. 

After over a year of seizures, my surgery was a success, and I've been seizure-free since. Sure, the first few days post-surgery were miserable, with bandages over my swollen head and tons of medical equipment attached and needled into my body, but thanks to my mother's efforts, I was at least able to enter the surgery with almost zero anxiety.

All of that said, perhaps my mother had been too successful in keeping me in the dark about the severity of the operation. When I was a senior in high school, a boy from my grade passed out one day, and I learned from some teachers that, like me, he had a brain tumor and would have to undergo surgery. The teachers were worried, but I tried to reassure them: "Oh, it's just simple brain surgery. I had one when I was 10, and it went perfectly fine. No need to worry!"

Only later did I finally realize that if even a tiny thing went wrong in my surgery, it could have screwed me up for life. After all, the doctors had gone through an exhaustive process to map out my brain, so all the clues were there.

Now, years later, I'm thankful to my mother for her parental "deceit" and for making this unimaginably complicated situation go as stress-free as possible. I still haven't asked her about all the details surrounding the entire saga, like how much happened behind the scenes without my awareness or what it is even like to have a young son suffering from seizures. I could ask her, but a part of me doesn't really want to.

One of the magical things about childhood is that (ideally) you have a person who's there to take care of all the grander problems of the world for you; it's an illusion but one that many of us treasure for the rest of our lives. And like with illusionary magic, sometimes you don't want to know how it's done and would rather leave the experience as you remember it.