Script for Tumor Audio

Modified: 2020-07-20

Here is the script for the audio file my tumor and its removal

• In 1996 I began to notice strange things. I could not put dishes away without first opening the cabinets. I got sudden headaches. I took long-ranging tours around a subject while lecturing and thinking it was brilliant (it wasn’t). One day I could not feel the bubbles of a soft drink on my tongue. My wife felt them. I tried it again and could feel the bubbles on the right side of my tongue only. A very painful and sudden headache in class made me make an appointment with a neurologist in Little Rock. The MRI was shocking. The entire brain was curving to the left. In Houston the neurosurgeon, Dr. Hassenbusch, could not identify the type of tumor from the MRI. Ironically, he died of an inoperable brain tumor 12 years later.
• On the day before surgery they asked if I was left-handed to assess the location of my brain’s language functions. I was not. If I had been left-handed they would have assigned further tests because 30% of left-handers have their language functions on the right side of their brains. Since then, I explain to the correlation between handedness and language function location to left-handers just in case they should ever need brain surgery.
• Early in the morning of my surgery I stood in line with a large number of other pre-op patients. The last thing I remember is counting backwards from 100, 99, 98, 97…
• I came out of the anesthesia badly. I imagined that I could look at people and their name would pop up over their head. “Wonderful,” I thought. I flew a landscape that was my mother’s face. I saw the devil, a nurse at the other end of the room. They brought my wife into post-op to calm me down. At that point we had two boys, then aged 3 and 5. When I saw her I told her, “Now we can have a girl.” In 1997 we did.
• In ICU my throat ached. I chewed ice. A year later I read my patient report, the intubation had only succeeded after they inserted the tube at an angle from the right side of my mouth to the left side of my trachea, the precise locations of the pain. Somehow a friend, Dean Allsman, convinced someone to put him through on the phone. The staff checked us asking us our names, the date, and the name of the president. The patient next to me, could not give the correct answers. He did not even know the year it was.
• I left the hospital with no hair on the right side of my head and with a screw hole just over my left eye where my head had been attached to the operating table. The tumor was a 3” cigar-shaped non-malignant meningioma. It’s good to survive to see our children grow up and to spend 24 more happy years with my wife. Discussing the brain in class is different than having brain surgery. Brain surgeries are not that common. The Mayo Clinic estimates that in the United States in 2020 some 24,000 adults and 3,500 children in the United States will need brain surgery.

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