I cut my hair obsessively in the dead of night when the only noises are the roar of the house furnace and the tandem snoring of my husband and our old dog. Snip. Snip. I can’t stop myself. I throw the cut strands of hair in the toilet and watch them flush, swirling into complicated patterns of gray, brown, and white.

There’s so much hair MIA from my head that I ask my husband to buy Rogaine for me because I’m too embarrassed to face the cashier, who I don’t know. I imagine him saying, “Why do you need this Rogaine?”

I imagine me saying, “It’s none of your business, now is it?”

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I have a scar in the back of my head that runs from my crown to the nape of my neck. No hair grows on the scar, and no hair grows on the dead patch to the left of the scar where the hair follicles atrophied from lack of oxygen because my neurosurgeon screwed around too long surgically removing my brain tumor.

The scar on the back of my head contains my Achilles’ heel, a damaged occipital nerve that anyone can touch and the pain will buckle me to my knees. When I cut my hair, I leave it long in back to hide my scar and my Achilles’ heel. My hair looks like a mullet, years past its fashionable peak, if that style ever had one.

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I wanted to kill myself. One day. After the brain surgery. When I was dusting the house.

I want to explain the incident away with “It was the drugs.”

My husband drove me to the emergency room where they took my clothes and strapped me to a gurney. I waited, naked and strapped, the rest of the day and part of the night until the drugs wore off, and then I went home and finished dusting.

My neurologist wrote in my chart that I was allergic to the suicide drug. I was inexplicably ashamed, as if I were the Drama Queen of the ER, spouting, in a bad Southern accent, ill-rehearsed lines from a Tennessee Williams play. “Life just outran me, Big Daddy . . . ”

My neurosurgeon tried to soothe my psyche by telling me several people really did kill themselves while on the clinical trial of the same drug. That did not help. Why did the FDA approve this drug? I researched the clinical trial on the Internet, and what my neurologist told me appeared to be true, only the drug company didn’t figure the deaths into their statistics because the participants died before the trial ended.

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I want to steal a car, preferably not a minivan; I need one with keys in the ignition because I don’t own a slim jim, and I wouldn’t know how to use one anway. I’ll drive like I used to, before my brain surgery, taking corners on two wheels, speeding to the quicki-mart for a pack of cigarettes. I want to smoke the cigs in the stolen car and stink up the upholstery. I want to drive to Hoover Dam and take a tour. I want to state hop to Vegas and dump the car on the strip.

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One night I was watching the TV show “House” and the main character, played by Hugh Laurie, explained, “Everyone lies to their doctor.” I never watched the show again. But neither have I ever told my neurologists the truth. Not any of them.

I always know what the new ones are going to ask because they all have the same questions from the same drill. First, they take my personal info on a Xeroxed sheet of fill-in-the-blank paper. Then, they chitchat with me a while to become my “friend.” Finally, embedded deep in the friendship-establishment segment of the visit, they ask, “Did you have any trauma to your skull?”

There is a firm belief that my type of brain tumor, a meningioma, was birthed from crumbled skull bone.

This is where I lie. I say, “No. Can’t think of anything,” but the truth is that I can. I list them silently in my mind—falling out of the tree, car wreck, and Dad, with Dad being the main suspect. And sometimes, after I have left the neurologist’s office and walked many blocks down the street, I think I should become the poster child of my own campaign for “This is why you don’t beat your kids,” but then, like the rest of the abused kids who grow up to have slow-growing brain tumors, I do nothing. I want to forget and pretend none of it happened. I want to think I didn’t deserve what he did. I don’t want to appear on “Oprah.” I don’t want to start a foundation. I don’t want anyone to know.

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Wichita Sims is the pseudonym of a writer living in Pacifica by the beach with her husband.

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