The One Year Anniversary of My Surgery (Craniotomy)

Just about a year ago, I had my first operation and my memory of that day is still rather vivid.  Evanston NorthShore Hospital, where I was scheduled to have my surgery, is a first-class hospital just up the road from Northwestern University’s lake shore campus.  Nestled into an area between a nicely kept up older neighborhood and a local par-three golf course, the hospital is surrounded by big old trees and green grass. The hospital building itself completed a major renovation not that long ago; and is clean, modern and well-kept.  It’s also busy. The lobby positively bustles with patients, families, doctors and technicians walking in and out and about.

It also seems right-sized.  It’s large enough to house experts providing a full-range of services without seeming to be as big and overwhelming as the Pentagon or the Merchandise Mart (i.e. a Chicago building owned by the Kennedy family that used to be the biggest building in the world). All-in-all, if you have to have surgery, it seems like a good place to be.

As best I can tell, the doctors at Evanston NorthShore hospital are not night owls.  They like to have operations early in the morning. So I and my entourage (wife, son David, daughters Sara and Jenny) all went with me to the hospital at the crack of dawn. 

The day before the operation, I started to wonder about what to bring with me to the hospital.  As an afterthought, I threw in a book—The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—which my wife recommended.  I also grabbed some newspaper Sudoku puzzles with the vague thought that maybe I’d need to brush up a bit after surgery.

My room, much to my relief, was private. I stowed my stuff in the closet. I walked around and noticed that if I stood up by the window I had a nice view of the Baha’i[1] temple (a strikingly beautiful building and local landmark). Then the waiting began.

I put on my flimsy robe.

I fidgeted.

We talked about the Spartans and their strong early start to the Big Ten football season.

We made pithy remarks about the weather.

David and I discussed the hamburgers we ate at Kuma’s (quite possibly the best burger in Chicagoland) the day before.

Much like the lead-up to my visit with the Ophthalmologist, we talked about everything but the “elephant in the room” my brain tumor and my impending operation.

Finally, somebody came in to start up an IV. I’m sure when I was being wheeled down to surgery; I started to talk to the orderly.  I was nervous and I wanted something to take my mind off the operation. At the same time, there’s this guy pushing you along the hall about six feet from you, it seems rather impolite to ignore him.

I have bare shreds of memories of the operating room.  The drugs kicked in quickly and quite effectively.

To be continued.

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Dealing with pre-operation nervousness (Part 1)

The phrase “brain tumor” is big and scary to most everybody.  There are good reasons for this – there’s nothing about the words “brain tumor” that implies “good health” or “long life.”

In addition, in case you sublimated the heart-to-heart post-MRI discussion with your surgeon, the pre-surgery papers you sign make it absolutely clear that all bets are off. The surgeons will do their best and they are really good, but there are lots of reasons, beyond their control, that really bad things can happen once they cut open your skull.

And in this case, really bad things are really bad.

So, how do you handle it (while waiting for the operation)? 

From what I can tell, most folks react in one of three ways:

1.  Obsessing about it

2.  Pretending it isn’t happening

3.  Becoming an amateur expert on brain tumors 

Let’s take a quick look at these obvious but, in my opinion, flawed emotional responses.

Obsessing about it

This is the most natural and immediate response – “Ohmigod, I have this thing growing inside my head and it’s going to kill me - ieeeoooww!!!”

While this may be true, it doesn’t seem to help anything.  You may find some sort of temporary tension release by making everybody around you crazy, but they may just strangle you before the operation.

In that vein, I imagined this conversation with my deceased, no-nonsense aunt.

            “Aunt Bertha, I have this big, scary tumor and I could die”

“Well dear, it’s time to take this like a big boy.  After all, you are 57 years old.”

“But, Aunt Bertha, the idea of a big tumor in my brain gives me the willies!”

            “Now John, while we’re all sorry about this, you are becoming rather tiresome.”

“But I could die.”

            “Well, if that shuts you up, then please hurry up about it.” 

Pretending it isn’t happening

When I was in high school and had what I was sure was terminal acne, pretending that you didn’t have acne just didn’t work.  For example, I’d walk up to some girl in the hallway and say:

Me: “Gee, isn’t trigonometry tough enough without Mrs. Butler giving us five pages of problems every night?”

Linda: “John, your zits are disgusting.”

Now the analogy doesn’t quite work when you have a brain tumor because, unless she’s Supergirl and has X-ray vision, she won’t know that you have a brain tumor.  (Actually, she might need MRI-vision to really appreciate the tumor.)

Whether you acknowledge your problem or not, I don’t know of any serious issue that gets “better” if you ignore it.

President Kennedy: “Robert, if we ignore the Russian missiles in Cuba, will this whole thing just blow over?”

Robert Kennedy:  “John, ‘blow over’ could turn into ‘blow up’ if we don’t do something.”

As best I can tell, problems only get worse, not better, the longer you ignore them.