The skinny yellow dog stood on its hind legs, a paw over my shoulder, and whispered in my ear. When I told my husband about it, I made it very clear that it was a skinny yellow dog and not our elderly black lab. I don’t remember what the yellow dog said exactly, but I do know it whispered something — something that I could understand — presumably in human language.
While I am a dog lover, I am not a dog whisperer, and my husband knew something was not right. He heard me out and noted the date and time. A day later, I landed in the hospital for a month.
Like anyone who reaches my age — I turned 64 in October — I have faced my share of traumatic events: illnesses, near deaths, and deaths of family and friends, including the suicide a decade ago of my then-ex-husband when our sons were 17 and 20, as well as the smaller punches life doles out like job losses and debt pileups. I weathered all of those by acknowledging each tragedy and then putting one foot in front of the other. I carried on. But what was happening in late August 2025 was happening to my brain — my brain.
I had been suffering daily headaches since spring. Although I’ve never had a migraine, I knew instinctively these were not migraines. Still, it was a headache like no other. My head hurt all over, and I felt as if the front of my face was being pressed outward from the inside.
Over several weeks I visited various doctors. They ruled out sinus infection, allergies, migraines, meningitis, something arthritis related, something that could be cured with prednisone, massage or chiropractic work. In fact, it was the chiropractor who told me that if she couldn’t help me in three or four visits, I should get a CT scan, which I did. Within a half hour of returning home from the lab, my personal physician called and told me that I had subdural hematomas — bleeding near the brain.
Despite knowing better, I went down the Google rabbit hole and scared myself. It turns out a person can die from a subdural hematoma. I was angry, too. I eat right, I exercise, I hadn’t had any bodily trauma. How could this happen to me?
While trying not to freak out, I made an appointment with a neurosurgeon who told me there wasn’t enough blood on my brain to warrant a burr hole surgery in which a surgeon drills a hole in the skull and drains the blood to relieve the pressure. (I couldn’t refrain from making I-need-this-like-a-hole-in-the-head jokes.)
The surgeon’s hope was that the blood would resorb back into my body. In the meantime, I was still in pain. The surgeon directed me to a neurologist. He determined I was having orthostatic headaches, which are positional. In other words, when I was lying down, I felt better than when I was vertical. It made sense then that upon waking, I usually had a brief respite. He also thought my headache could be caused by a cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) leak. An MRI confirmed he was correct.
Since I hadn’t had an accident, an epidural, or any trauma to my spine, I was diagnosed with a “spontaneous” CSF leak. (Translation: We don’t know why the heck you have this.) It’s rare, occurring in only about five out of 100,000 people (that’s .00005%).
The leak in my spinal column had caused my brain to sag since there wasn’t enough pressure to hold up the brain and allow it to float in the skull. (Imagine the inside of your toilet tank. If there’s not enough water pressure, the mechanism for flushing just dangles.) My sagging brain was pulling away from the skull, causing the veins between the membranes to rupture and bleed, hence, the hematomas.
My neurologist suggested a blood patch, which can halt a CSF leak. In effect, the physician gives you an epidural using your own blood, which clots and “patches up” the leak. But my leak, I would find out later, could not be so easily contained.
One night, soon after getting the blood patch, I woke at 4 a.m. with terrible pain in my right flank. My husband drove me to the hospital emergency room. After three CT scans — because something just didn’t look right — it appeared I had a pulmonary embolism in my right lung. No one could determine why it was there. And it was odd that I was clotting in one area and bleeding in another. I was put on an IV blood thinner and monitored for several days. Then I was sent home, still with a headache.
That’s when the yellow dog jumped up and whispered in my ear. Maybe the dog was warning me that things were about to get worse. I should say warning “us” because while my husband knows I can be whimsical, my absolute certainty about talking dogs had put him on high alert. The following day was the start of Labor Day weekend, and I could barely function. I just wanted to sleep. My husband guided me to the car, and we returned to the emergency room.
Twenty-four hours later, I had my first of three craniotomies and a burr hole surgery to drain blood from my head. Eventually I would also have a laminoplasty, in which the surgeon removed a part of a vertebrae and injected a kind of sealant that plugged the spinal column leak.
I spent all of September 2025 in a hospital bed in a haze. I had staples and stitches in my head. I was intubated and had anesthesia — both propofol and fentanyl — clogging my system. But I do have some memory of that time. During mid-afternoons, a darkness would descend, and I’d want to succumb. Then I would think about my sons — how would they survive another traumatic death of a parent? Some piece of my brain told me I was having panic attacks, but because I had a tube down my throat and was in an anesthetic Neverland, I could not communicate this.
I tried to text, but my brain didn’t connect with my fingers, which couldn’t press hard enough on the phone. I tried pointing to individual letters written on paper to spell out my feelings. I never quite hit the right letter, and there was nothing but frustration. Finally, a doctor handed me a chart with pictures of faces labeled happy, sad, anxious, etc. I poked at the word “anxious” until my husband realized what I was trying to let him know. I was terrified. His understanding made all the difference.
Whether you meet someone in your 20s or your 40s, you don’t ever really know how they will show up when feces are literally rolling down your thighs. My husband showed up in ways I couldn’t have imagined. He may not have heard the yellow dog, but he heard me. After realizing how scared I was, he took up residence 24/7 on the recliner in my hospital room. He assisted the nurses by changing my sheets and my dressing gown. He woke at 3 a.m. to help me to the bathroom. He held my hand. He told me how much he loved me. He was the one who told the surgeons to shave my head instead of creating islands of bald spots. He knew I would be happier bald than looking like a crazed Larry David. He also created a Caring Bridge site that he updated daily to answer the many queries coming from friends and family.
Although my mental state was fuzzy, I needed clarity on all I’d been through. One night, my husband and I sat on my hospital bed and went through the Caring Bridge messages. It hadn’t occurred to me until then exactly what he’d been going through. While I was essentially asleep, he had been on the outside looking in. For each procedure, he had to authorize my going under the knife. He would sit in the hospital stairwell and cry each time he signed the papers. What choice did he have? How difficult to hold a loved one’s life in one’s hands. How do people do this?
I was sent home in mid-October. Since then, I’ve been trying to put this experience into perspective. I had been near death. I survived. While I know it’s cliché, I recognize how precious life is. How important relationships are. Many of my friends did not think they would ever see me again; people tell me my recovery is miraculous. The doctors tell me that because I’d been in such good physical condition pre-surgery, my recovery is moving more quickly than expected. I am doing Pilates, going for long walks, cooking and entertaining. My family, friends and neighbors have buoyed and supported me with cards, calls, meals, flowers and gifts.
One morning in the hospital, I woke to see my husband standing over me. I raised my arms to pull him close. All our communication came down to that hug. This way, life. That way, darkness. While I want so desperately to organize this experience and move forward, perhaps I’m trying to assign meaning too soon. For right now, I need to allow myself to continue to heal — and to accept the love and the well wishes. So, I put one foot in front of the other. I carry on. But I’m on alert for the yellow dog.
Stacey Freed is a freelance writer whose work appears in myriad national trade and consumer publications, including The New York Times, AARP, USA Today, Real Simple, House Logic, Realtor, Zillow and many others. She is co-author of “Hiking the Catskills” and the former vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. When she’s not working she can be found hiking, running or baking.
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