I’m a neurosurgeon and, for the past thirteen years, I’ve been on the neurosurgery staff at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. As a neurosurgeon here, I’ve been taking care of patients with cancerous brain tumors and patients with severe chronic pain.
In April 2005, I started having severe headaches. They began after I had run the 5K Run for the Rose, a fundraising event for brain tumor research. The race was founded in honor of one of my former patients—Marnie Rose, a physician specializing in pediatrics —who died from a brain tumor, specifically a glioblastoma.
After my headaches did not go away over the next four weeks, I had an MRI, or brain scan, done to prove to myself that the headaches were simply stress-related or perhaps migraines.
When I got out of the MRI scanner, I saw one of my MRI films on an X-ray viewing box and, from ten feet away, I could see a three-inch tumor in the right side of my brain (temporal lobe) just behind and to the side of my right eye. I knew immediately that it was a glioblastoma: one of the most malignant brain tumors, and curiously enough, the type or tumor that I usually operated on with most of my patients. Immediately, I saw the next year of my life flash in front of my eyes. I had taken care of people with this type of tumor for almost twenty years at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and at Cleveland Clinic Foundation before that.
One of the most difficult parts of all this was explaining the good and bad about the glioblastoma to my wife Rhonda, who was there with me. This was just a totally bizarre irony of life. By the way, you can’t catch a tumor like this from other patients—it’s not contagious.
That night at home wasn’t much fun, and the questions were flying. Had twenty-five years of neurosurgery just gone down the drain? Was I still signed up at work for disability insurance? Had we kept up payments on my life insurance policies? How much did we owe on the house mortgage?
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