I have a brain tumor.

That is by far the strangest sentence I’ve ever spoken or typed. The doctors are 99% sure that it is a Benign Meningioma. I will be undergoing surgery to have it removed on December 13. I am still wrapping my head around this (no pun intended) but my overall feeling about it is that I knew there was something wrong; we figured out what it is and there is a plan to fix it!

I am grateful that I have a fantastic support team of family, friends and the company I work for. Sean and I really liked the Neurosurgeon when we met with him and are confident I am in great hands!

I am thankful to have a doctor who listened to me and investigated what could be causing the symptoms I was experiencing. These tumors grow slowly, which makes them hard to diagnose because symptoms come on gradually. Mine has probably been growing for the last 5 years and it is a little bigger than a golf ball.

Last December a friend from college posted about a similar situation and she almost didn’t bring it up to her doctor but did and found out that she had a brain tumor. She had it removed and is doing great. I had that situation in the back of my mind when deciding if I wanted to talk to my doctor and I am so happy that I did.

So what does Christopher Walken have to do with all of this? Sean and I were watching the second season of “Outlaws” on Amazon and were about halfway through. Suddenly, I realized I couldn’t remember the name of the actor who played Frank Sheldon. No big deal, right? No, not for me. I LOVE Christopher Walken; I know all of his sketches and movies and quote him pretty often. I had been having issues with memory and concentration, so instead of googling his name or even mentioning it to Sean, I decided to test it. It was like I could see it in my mind but just couldn’t access it. I kept thinking Clive Walker or Clay Walker and I knew it was close but could not get there. Over 3 days I kept coming back to it and was never any closer to knowing what it his name was. I finally looked it up and knew something was wrong.

Honestly, I was a little embarrassed to bring this up to my doctor because it seemed so ridiculous but my Primary Care Doctor took it very seriously, ordering blood tests, and when those came back normal she ordered an MRI. That was to show if there was evidence of MS or any lesions; of those options MS seemed a lot more likely. If the MRI came back clean, she was going to refer me to Neurology to investigate more.

I had the MRI on a Wednesday morning (October 19) and truly wasn’t worried. Even when the technician told me he was looking over one of the images and would come in to pull me out in a couple of minutes. I still think about him and how awful it would be to find a tumor in a 36-year-old woman who you were just joking with before her test. Looking back, I had no idea of the battle I was about to get thrown in to and how much my life and my family’s lives were going to change.

Fast forward to that afternoon, we were getting ready to go to our nephew’s birthday party and I saw an email that I had a new test result in MyChart. In my mind, this meant everything was fine; if anything was seriously wrong, the result wouldn’t be released so fast, right? Boy, was I wrong! I opened up the report; the first line read “Left anterior cranial fossa extra-axial mass with imaging characteristics suspicious of meningioma. Associated mass effect as detailed.” What? What does that mean? By the way, you don’t get images on the MRI report. So, as I am reading all of the findings, I am googling the words, phrases, and entire sentences because I have no idea what any of them mean. I had 17 tabs open on my browser trying to piece it all together. I figured out that the MRI showed a brain tumor on my left frontal lobe. I know that with this information my entire world is about to change and I decided that I would wait to tell Sean until after the party and after we put Colin to bed.

We enjoyed ourselves at the party; we got to meet our niece for the first time, and I enjoyed the last moments I could pretend everything was normal. After we put Colin to bed, I broke the news to Sean. I can still picture it perfectly in slow motion. At the bottom of the steps, I looked him in the eyes, blurted out “I have a brain tumor,” hugged him hard, and I don’t remember anything else from that night.