He made it sound like getting a cavity filled, no big deal. And yet, as the scan showed, it was a life-threatening condition, probably quite similar to the one that killed the actress Natasha Richardson last year: a subdural hematoma, a blood clot that had been growing under my skull for two months and putting pressure on my brain. (Eerily, Ms. Richardson was laughing and talking hours after the ski accident that caused her epidural hematoma.)

My layman’s investigation of subdural hematomas has since informed me that they are “associated with high mortality and morbidity rates, even with the best medical and neurosurgical care.” As Dr. Herbert H. Engelhard III, a neurosurgeon at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes on the Web site emedicine, “Surgery may be urgently required, yet even emergency surgery does not guarantee a satisfactory outcome.”

Image DAMAGED A CT scan of the writer’s brain. Subdural hematomas like the one she suffered are associated with high mortality rates, even with the best care. Credit... NYU Medical Center

The surgeon who told me to come back in two days explained to my internist later that I’d said I wanted to go home to take my son to the movies. He showed no hesitation about allowing me to go home and simply reminded me to return on Thursday for the operation. I still have the prescription on which he wrote down these instructions (in case I might forget!).

So off to the movies it was. I took Danny to see “Despicable Me,” and I still shudder to think this might have become the last movie I’d ever see. Thankfully, I remember none of it.

As we walked home that Tuesday evening, we ran into two teenagers who live in our building and occasionally baby-sit for us. One of them, Elizabeth Boyd, strolled ahead with Danny. Her brother Andrew took my arm and helped me navigate home; I was weaving pretty badly. I didn’t know until three days later that my doorman had taken me upstairs.

From that moment, I can tell you absolutely nothing about what happened, except as it was eventually reconstructed for me by others. Fortunately, my adult nephew, Rob Fishman, has been living in my apartment. Even more fortunately, his father is a doctor. That he happened to be bicycling in France at that moment was not a plus, but Rob called him when he found me on Wednesday morning lying in bed, vomiting, half-dressed and incoherent.