The diagnosis of my husband’s brain tumor was, at the very least, a shock. Looking back, there were some warning signs prior to our visit to the emergency room on that cold January morning, but as they always say, “Hindsight is 20/20.”
And so our story begins.
The month of November 2002 had been very stressful for Rob, a 32-year-old National Account Manager for Sprint PCS. Job cuts were causing everyone to feel stressed and overworked. Rob was feeling the effects as his team of thirteen managers had been reduced to three.
Over Thanksgiving break, I noticed Rob had been fatigued and just plain grumpy. While at his grandmother’s house for dinner, I asked Rob to pass me a plate for our son, Gavin. Rob answered me with a loud curse word. I was embarrassed and angered. What was wrong with him? The family members just stood and stared. This was NOT the Rob we knew. He was acting totally out of character, especially at Grandma’s house!
A week later, we ordered a pizza over the phone and I noticed Rob couldn’t remember our address or phone number. When he finally blurted out the phone number, it was incorrect. I remember asking myself, “What is going on with him?” I dismissed it as the undue stress he was feeling from work.
For the next two months, strange and bizarre incidents like the ones I’ve listed above kept continuing. Finally, in January, Rob was having a hard time getting out of bed. He went to the doctor and explained his symptoms and the horrible back and head pain he was having. The doctor found Rob had strep throat, and Rob immediately began taking oral antibiotics. The doctor also prescribed pain medication, saying that the strep throat and stress from his job was probably causing some migraine headaches. But the pain persisted and Rob became worse.
On the morning of January 12, 2003, Rob woke up with no peripheral vision in his right eye. I immediately called his doctor who advised us to go to the emergency room. The doctor at the ER said that Rob was probably experiencing the effects of an ongoing migraine; however, he would run a CT scan “to make certain nothing else was going on.”
The doctor didn’t seem overly worried, and when I asked if I could go back with Rob during the CT scan, he said, “Oh … this will only take about thirty minutes. We’ll be back in no time.”
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