Brain Tumor Day Quotes

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live. In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake. That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead. And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too

And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point,when the world as we know cease to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confess that there's someone else and that he's leaving .or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend . Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor

They either come back or they don’t. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s what you learn. As you go through mundane days with so much of pain beating in your chest that you feel it will explode. You strike days off your calendar, waiting, going for a run, picking up a new hobby, while trying to numb that part of your brain that refuses to forget the little details of your skin. Soon, you start sleeping in the middle of the bed, learn how to get through the evenings alone, go to cafes and cities alone, you learn how to cook enough dinner for yourself and just make do without the kisses on your neck. You learn…Adjust..Accept.. The tumor of pain already exploded one lonely night when you played his voice recording by mistake.. by mistake.. But you didn’t die.. Did you? They either come back.. or they don’t.. You survive..

It’s as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I’m their tumor.

day. I quickly learned I could impact my health and attitude with gratitude.

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

I remember thinking how easy it was to forget that we live day to day under a shadow. A car accident. A crazy guy with a gun. A brain tumor. You never know. Enjoy the moment.

Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen.

And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confesses that there's someone else and that he's leaving. Or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend. Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor. Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only read the portents rather than disregarding them? And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight?

One day, Matthew, the little boy with the brain tumor who had charmed the ward a few years back, was readmitted. His hypothalamus had, in fact, been slightly damaged during the operation to remove his tumor; the adorable eight-year-old was now a twelve-year-old monster. He never stopped eating; he threw violent fits. His mother’s arms were scarred with purple scratches. Eventually Matthew was institutionalized: he had become a demon, summoned by one millimeter of damage. For every surgery, a family and a surgeon decide together that the benefits outweigh the risks, but this was still heartbreaking. No one wanted to think about what Matthew would be like as a three-hundred-pound twenty-year-old.

By 1986, Noriega’s blatant cocaine dealings threatened to further complicate the ongoing Iran Contra hearings. In an effort to threaten Noriega into silence and temporary inactivity, a meeting took place in Bradenton Beach, Florida near McDill Air Force Base. I was there on Noriega’s yacht along with Oliver North and Aquino, among others12. The object of “Operation Shell Game” was to appeal to Noriega’s superstitions since a logical approach hadn’t slowed his CIA cocaine ops down. Psychological Warfare, which is designed to incite superstitious response, was used to no avail. Soon after, CIA Chief William Casey died of a sudden brain tumor the day he was to testify in Iran Contra, and the scandal diverted away from Noriega’s dealings. By the time Bush Sr.’s ‘Operation Just Cause’ resulted in the incarceration of his former CIA associate Noriega, much pertinent information had come to light that not only validated our case but brought us to this point of providing details to Internal Affairs.

Another Damasio patient, “Elliot,” was a successful husband, father, and businessman until undergoing brain surgery on a tumor. The surgery damaged his frontal lobe and thereby affected his ability to carry through on plans. He would embark on a project only to lose sight of his goal in doing so. For example, asked to sort documents, he would go overboard: “He was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of those papers carefully and intelligently, and to spend an entire day doing so. Or he might spend a whole afternoon deliberating on which principle of categorization should be applied.

By dawn tomorrow or the day after that he would pass into Nevada, striking Owyhee first and then Mountain City, and in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers and then the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, a body politic with its network of roads embedded in its skin like marvelous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter, anywhere or everywhere—heart, liver, lights, brain. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

By dawn tomorrow or the day after that he would pass into Nevada, striking Owyhee first and then Mountain City, and in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers and then the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, a body politic with its network of roads embedded in its skin like marvelous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter, anywhere or everywhere-heart, liver, lights, brain. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate- they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

Things I worried about on the bus: a snapshot of an anxious brain . . . Is that car slowing down? Is someone going to get out and kidnap me? It is slowing down. What if someone asks for directions? What if—Oh. They’re just dropping someone off. The bus is late. What if it doesn’t arrive? What if I’m late getting to school? Did I turn my straighteners off ? What if the bus isn’t running today and no one told me? Where’s the—oh. There’s the bus. Oh crap is that Rowan from Biology? What if he sees me? What if he wants to chat? Hide. Okay, he hasn’t seen me. He hasn’t seen me. What if he did see me and now he thinks I’m weird for not saying hi? Did I remember to clean out Rita’s bowl properly? What if she gets sick? One day Rita will die. One day I’ll die. One day everyone will die. What if I die today and everyone sees that my bra has a hole in it? What if the bus crashes? Where are the exits? Why is there an exit on the ceiling? What if that headache Dad has is a brain tumor? Would I live with Mum all the time if Dad died? Why am I thinking about my living arrangements instead of how horrible it would be if Dad died? What’s wrong with me? What if Rhys doesn’t like me? What if he does? What if we get together and we split up? What if we get together and don’t split up and then we’re together forever until we die? One day I’ll die. Did I remember to turn my straighteners off ? Yes. Yes. Did I? Okay my stop’s coming up. I need to get off in about two minutes. Should I get up now? Will the guy next to me get that I have to get off or will I have to ask him to move? But what if he’s getting off too and I look like a twat? What if worrying kills brain cells? What if I never get to go to university? What if I do and it’s awful? Should I say thank you to the driver on the way off ? Okay, get up, move toward the front of the bus. Go, step. Don’t trip over that old man’s stick. Watch out for the stick. Watch out for the—shit. Did anyone notice that? No, no one’s looking at me. But what if they are? Okay, doors are opening, GO! I didn’t say thank you to the driver. What if he’s having a bad day and that would have made it better? Am I a bad person? Yeah but did I actually turn my straighteners off ?

Things I worried about on the bus: a snapshot of an anxious brain . . . Is that car slowing down? Is someone going to get out and kidnap me? It is slowing down. What if someone asks for directions? What if—Oh. They’re just dropping someone off. The bus is late. What if it doesn’t arrive? What if I’m late getting to school? Did I turn my straighteners off ? What if the bus isn’t running today and no one told me? Where’s the—oh. There’s the bus. Oh crap is that Rowan from Biology? What if he sees me? What if he wants to chat? Hide. Okay, he hasn’t seen me. He hasn’t seen me. What if he did see me and now he thinks I’m weird for not saying hi? Did I remember to clean out Rita’s bowl properly? What if she gets sick? One day Rita will die. One day I’ll die. One day everyone will die. What if I die today and everyone sees that my bra has a hole in it? What if the bus crashes? Where are the exits? Why is there an exit on the ceiling? What if that headache Dad has is a brain tumor? Would I live with Mum all the time if Dad died? Why am I thinking about my living arrangements instead of how horrible it would be if Dad died? What’s wrong with me? What if Rhys doesn’t like me? What if he does? What if we get together and we split up? What if we get together and don’t split up and then we’re together forever until we die? One day I’ll die. Did I remember to turn my straighteners off ? Yes. Yes. Did I? Okay my stop’s coming up. I need to get off in about two minutes. Should I get up now? Will the guy next to me get that I have to get off or will I have to ask him to move? But what if he’s getting off too and I look like a twat? What if worrying kills brain cells? What if I never get to go to university? What if I do and it’s awful? Should I say thank you to the driver on the way off ? Okay, get up, move toward the front of the bus. Go, step. Don’t trip over that old man’s stick. Watch out for the stick. Watch out for the—shit. Did anyone notice that? No, no one’s looking at me. But what if they are? Okay, doors are opening, GO! I didn’t say thank you to the driver. What if he’s having a bad day and that would have made it better? Am I a bad person?

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

People sometimes ask what it’s like to be a surgeon who works with the living human brain each day. I think sometimes it’s like being Harry Potter—a wizard who has at his command such wonderful technologies as an MRI machine that lets us image the tissue as we remove the tumor, or a global positioning system that lets us navigate through the brain, or an operating microscope that magnifies objects forty times and lets us do very precise surgery. More often, however, it’s like Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, trying to fulfill a quest against an unknown evil, surrounded by friends and working teams and helped by a little magic. You often feel vulnerable and frightened, despite a brave exterior.

The tumor will eventually take Paul’s life. However, focused ultrasound therapy could transform a fatal condition into one that is chronic, but manageable. In contrast to the best current treatment circa 2015, the futuristic ultrasound therapy depicted here circa 2025 could potentially be accomplished on an outpatient basis without multiple days of hospitalization; without surgery and its attendant risks of infection and complications like blood clots and brain damage; without the harmful effects of radiation; and with minimal side effects of chemotherapy due to focused drug delivery. The net result could be a dramatic improvement in the quality and longevity of countless lives, and decreased cost of treatment.

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

It’s rumored that a year ago, a five-year-old kid went into surgery to have a brain tumor removed. When the surgeon sawed open his skull, the “tumor” jumped out, a ball of whipping tentacles that launched itself at the surgeon and burrowed into his eye socket. Two minutes later, he and two nurses lay dead in the OR, their craniums neatly cleaned from the inside. I say this incident was “rumored” because at this point in the story, men in suits showed up, flashed official-looking ID and took away the bodies. The story in the paper the next day was that everybody died due to an oxygen tank explosion.

And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know cease to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confess that there's someone else and that he's leaving .or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend . Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor. Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only red the portents rather than disregarding them? And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight?

And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know cease to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confess that there's someone else and that he's leaving .or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend . Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor. Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only red the portents rather than disregarding them? And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight?

twenty-nine-year-old patient she had recently cared for who had an inoperable brain tumor that continued to grow through second-line chemotherapy. The patient elected not to attempt any further chemotherapy, but getting to that decision required hours of discussion, for this was not the decision he had expected to make. First, the oncologist said, she had a discussion with him alone. They reviewed the story of how far he’d come, the options that remained. She was frank. She told him that in her entire career she had never seen third-line chemotherapy produce a significant response in his type of brain tumor. She had looked for experimental therapies, and none were truly promising. And, although she was willing to proceed with chemotherapy, she told him how much strength and time the treatment would take away from him and his family. He did not shut down or rebel. His questions went on for an hour. He asked about this therapy and that therapy. Gradually, he began to ask about what would happen as the tumor got bigger, what symptoms he’d have, what ways they could try to control them, how the end might come. The oncologist next met with the young man together with his family. That discussion didn’t go so well. He had a wife and small children, and at first his wife wasn’t ready to contemplate stopping chemo. But when the oncologist asked the patient to explain in his own words what they’d discussed, she understood. It was the same with his mother, who was a nurse. Meanwhile, his father sat quietly and said nothing the entire time. A few days later, the patient returned to talk to the oncologist. “There should be something. There must be something,” he said. His father had shown him reports of cures on the Internet. He confided how badly his father was taking the news. No patient wants to cause his family pain. According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want.

Does the discovery of Whitman’s brain tumor modify your feelings about his senseless murdering? If Whitman had survived that day, would it adjust the sentencing you would consider appropriate for him? Does the tumor change the degree to which you consider it “his fault”? Couldn’t you just as easily be unlucky enough to develop a tumor and lose control of your behavior? On the other hand, wouldn’t it be dangerous to conclude that people with a tumor are somehow free of guilt, or that they should be let off the hook for their crimes? The man on the tower with the mass in his brain gets us right into the heart of the question of blameworthiness. To put it in the legal argot: was he culpable? To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right?

deaths is by counteracting a tumor’s attempts to pry open the lymphatic bars on its cage and spread throughout the body.60 So should everyone take a “baby”-strength aspirin a day? (Note that aspirin should never actually be given to infants or children.)61 No. The problem is that aspirin can cause side effects. The same blood-thinning benefit that can prevent a heart attack can also cause a hemorrhagic stroke, in which you bleed into your brain. Aspirin can also damage the lining of the digestive tract. For those who’ve already had a heart attack and continue

Ginger was well aware of the difference between how she was perceived at school and how she felt at home. At school she was a reliable, efficient, clear-headed thinker. At home, she felt like a poster child for the derailed. In the past, she’d tried to apply her no-nonsense nurseness to her off-duty home life, but she never managed to make it work. This was how it would go: a boy at school would complain that he had to keep clearing his throat, and she’d confidently reassure him it was probably just a cold. If the problem persisted, she would call home and suggest the mother take him to an allergist. But if Julia complained of the same postnasal drip, instead of thinking allergist, Ginger would suddenly remember the mother she met at Field Day whose brain tumor had presented with exactly that symptom.