One of my best friends is going to die of brain cancer. It’s just a matter of time.
She’s 31 years old and speaks three languages, plays the piano, and has explored a dozen countries in hiking boots by day and 4-inch heels by night. She loves horseback riding, French literature, Sex and the City, and ballroom dancing. She wrote a mystery novel and is editing it to submit it for publication, and she’s supposed to defend her thesis in November for her PhD in nuclear physics. She has never said no to any crazy adventure. She’s loud, sexy, and unapologetic, and charms her way into and out of all sorts of trouble.
A tumor in her brain is probably going to keep her from ever seeing the far side of 40.
She had a seizure last week. Her coworkers said it looked like she was swatting a fly near her nose over and over, then she turned around in her chair and fell to the floor, having a full tonic-clonic seizure, the dramatic full-body convulsions that always look so over-the-top on the medical dramas. She only remembers being at a meeting and waking up on the floor with a voice telling her the ambulance was on its way. A large glowing tumor in her right frontal lobe glared threateningly from her MRI pictures, so she came here to Johns Hopkins to find someone who could help her. I was with her yesterday as she sat with a neuro-oncologist, analyzing the battlefield of her brain, planning the attack. She had an appointment with a surgeon later that afternoon, but she asked the neuro-oncologist who he would want removing a tumor in his brain, and he was honest with her and suggested someone else, someone with more years of surgery under his belt than the surgeon we were scheduled to meet with. Naturally, she wanted to see this busy, world-renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon right away, at a moment’s notice, and, somehow, this guy made it happen - ten minutes later he was in the room telling her he would schedule the surgery for Monday. He was impressed with her intelligence and her attitude, and when she made a “it’s not brain surgery” quip when he complimented her on her nuclear physics degree, he responded with “well, I can’t do rocket science”, and I think that helped her make the decision to choose him. She has always had this gift, this magical luck where she gets whatever she needs. It’s some ridiculous positive thinking, a refusal to even consider not making something happen, a drive to wring the absolute most out of life no matter what. She’s Han Solo - never tell her the odds.
On Monday morning she will have a section of skull removed so they can take out this alien that’s invading her brain. I’ve seen this sort of surgery on TV and thought it was so cool, but now it will be her pink brain under the knife, and that makes it horrible. After the surgery, maybe radiation and chemotherapy, depending on what they find when they get a look at the tumor. In the best case, they say, it’s an oligodendroglioma, stage 2, and the average survival for that sort of tumor is somewhere around seven years. The doctors were honest with her and said it’s very possible it’s stage 3 already, and maybe an astrocytoma, which is worse, and if that’s the case it’s going to mean a more aggressive treatment and a worse prognosis. The problem with this sort of tumor is that it doesn’t have nice defined edges, so you can never get it all. It will come back, it’s just a matter of how long she gets to enjoy a normal life before it comes back and wins.
I’m so scared for her.
Her family will be staying with me for a few days while she’s in the hospital - I can’t take that much time off work to be there, but I told her sister to consider my place a kind of Ronald McDonald house, and I made her a key and told her to come and go as she needs, eat what she needs out of my fridge and pantry, and ask me for anything. I managed to hold it together while they were here, but they flew home to Orlando today to get things ready before coming back Sunday night, and when the car was out of the driveway I broke down completely.
