As Funny as a Brain Tumor! Part 5

Here we are at Part 5 in the story………….A couple of days after the whole “LensCrafters” experience,  I decided to go get some Chinese food with a good musician friend of mine down in Boston.  During dinner,  I told him about all the things I have just told you in Parts 1-4 of this story.  I remember going through every detail.  He was fascinated and asking a lot of questions.  He was bewildered at why I hadn’t gone to see a Doctor yet.  He told me that his Dad was a prominent Psychologist in Boston and asked if he could talk to him and get some advice from him.  I said  “Sure. that’s cool”.

The next morning I went to work at my job at the convenient store.  I kept hearing my friends voice in my head asking why I hadn’t gone to my Doctor so I called my doctor to make an appointment for a physical.  I think it was a 4 month wait until I could get the physical.  I don’t remember going into all the details about what I was going through but just booked the physical.  As I  was counting money in my back office later, the phone rang.  It was my friend that I had had dinner with the night before.  He said that he had talked to his Dad and his Dad said I should go see a doctor ASAP.  I told my friend not to worry and that I had made an appointment for 4 months later  which was as soon as they could see me.  I remember him saying that he thought that was too much time to wait and that he would call me back.  He called a few minutes later and with a very serious and urgent tone said that he had talked to his Dad again and that his Dad said that my situation sounded very serious and there was something very wrong.  He told me to leave work immediately and go to the Mass General Hospital emergency room.  I thought my friend and his Dad were overreacting and told him I would go after I was done with work that day.  I hung up the phone and started to count the rest of the money on the desk.  I was having trouble concentrating though.  I kept thinking  about what he had just told me and was getting more and more anxious.  Finally, I put all the money away in the safe and called my friend to ask if he would go with me to the hospital.  He said he would meet me down there. ( I know what you’re thinking “Finally!”

The drive down to Boston took me about 25 minutes.  I remember feeling like a nervous wreck the whole way down.  When I got to the emergency room it had a fair number of people in it.  If you’ve ever been in a big city emergency room you know that it can be filled with people with quite a variety of problems.  I remember sitting in a corner just giggling and laughing while people around me were bleeding, throwing up, crying and rocking in pain.  I was laughing the whole time.   These sick and perhaps dying people were looking over at me like I was an idiot.  My friend got there and finally they called my name.  I went up and the nurse asked what the problem was.  I remember just pointing to my face while laughing hysterically and saying “This!”  She was a bit confused so I went into detail about everything I have told you up until this point.  I remember going back to my seat and waiting some more.  Finally, a doctor came over and asked me all the same questions the nurse had.  He had me go through a bunch of weird tests that I thought were bizarre.  He would have me point at an object and then touch my nose over and over again. He would touch and scratch various parts of my body and ask if I could feel it.  He had me walking in straight lines and standing on one foot.  He would press down and up on my legs and arms and ask for me to push against him.  It felt like a DWI test being done by a state trooper………….Yes, I had one of those done once (I passed, but that is another story).   Finally, he said he would like me to get an MRI.  Everything I had told him about made him think it was something neurological and that an MRI would be the best course of action.

I remember going into the MRI machine and thinking that it was like being in a coffin.  Your in this long tube and the ceiling is about 24 inches from your face.  The difficulty with doing this at that time was that I couldn’t stop laughing.  To get good MRI scans you have to lay as still as you can and I was laughing and bouncing all over the place.  You wear headphones inside the machine and all I kept hearing was “Don’t move”  “Please stop moving”  “Please remain still”  “DON’T MOVE!” (a degree of frustration was in this voice).  They finally got the scans that they needed and I went back to waiting in a small room.  I remember not too long afterwards,  a doctor came in and told me that they had looked at the MRI and found a tumor about the size of a golf ball.  The tumor was apparently crushing my brain stem.   I was laughing when he told me and my response was “That’s terrific!”  He thought maybe I had misunderstood him and repeated what he had told me the first time.  I had the same reaction……..  I laughed ecstatically.  You have to remember that up until this moment in time I was thoroughly convinced that I was going insane.  The relationship with my fiance at the time had ended badly,  I had lost my music gig and wasn’t playing much,  my job performance at my day job was getting worse and worse (I don’t think I mentioned that).  I couldn’t have a normal conversation with anyone without totally losing it and cracking up.  I couldn’t go to the bathroom in public.  All my friends thought I was weird.  I was seeing a Psychologist  for my problems and getting nowhere.  I was totally convinced that I was crazy……………… When that doctor came in and said there was something physically wrong  with  me that was one of the happiest moments of my life.  It was great news!  There was something physically causing this and maybe there was something that could be done about it.

The visits and meeting at the hospital are a bit of a blur.  I think I was there for a few days.  I remember seeing a multitude of doctors.  MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital) is a teaching hospital so these large groups of interns would come in trailing the doctors like on Greys Anatomy or ER or something.  I would get the same questions from every doctor and every intern over and over.  I also remember them performing multiple tests on me like that first Neurologists had done in the ER.   At a certain point,  I just felt like saying “Can’t you just ask the other 20 people that have done these same tests on me?” I must have done that test probably 20 times……………

MGH  asked if they could have a bunch of doctors come from the Boston area hospitals to meet with me because of my intriguing symptoms.  I went into this board room and there were about 20 of the top Neurologists from around Boston asking me all about my story.  They actually video taped that session. (I would love to get my hands on that video just to see it) These were some of the most serious and intense people I had ever talked to in my life and I was laughing hysterically the whole time.  I don’t remember them even cracking a smile.  They all asked me the same questions and I recounted my story just like I have for you here.  They were taking notes and  kept apologizing for all the questions.  I got the feeling that brain tumors that cause laughter aren’t very common.

The way the Doctors explained my situation to me was that the tumor was crushing my brain stem.  They showed me the MRI’s and compared them to a normal persons MRI’s.  With a normal person you will see a nice roundish brain stem that leaves the brain and is attached to the spinal cord.  In my situation right where the brain stem should have been was a big white golf ball type object.  The brain stem was smashed over to one side and was squeezed into a thin line making it’s way around the tumor.  What the doctors thought was happening was that my brain was sending signals to my body and the signals were getting delayed or distorted by the smashed brain stem.  When I would go to drink some water it would get half way down and then the automatic message to swallow would get stuck in the brain stem.  The same thing would happen with the going to the bathroom message from the brain.  My brain would send a message to my body to go to the bathroom and the message would just get stuck in that smashed brain stem.  The laughing was caused by my brain sending my body a signal and the message sent would get all convoluted and come out as “laugh”.

The doctors finally decided that the best course was to operate and try to take the tumor out physically.  Now this was a pretty dangerous surgery but we’ll get to that later.  In the meantime they sent me home for two weeks until the surgery date.  I’ll get to the details of that in the next installment (Part 6)