Positive Brain Tumor Quotes

We have something weird in our brains, a sort of tumor that propels us toward love. We can’t live without it. Out of love we put up with children and men. Our self-denial is a form of servitude. Have you noticed that individualism and selfishness are considered positive traits in men and defects in women? We

Major General Leonard Wood Leonard Wood was an army officer and physician, born October 9, 1860 in Winchester, New Hampshire. His first assignment was in 1886 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona where he fought in the last campaign against the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches 100 miles through hostile territory and was promoted to the rank of Captain, commanding a detachment of the 8th Infantry. From 1887 to 1898, he served as a medical officer in a number of positions, the last of which was as the personal physician to President William McKinley. In 1898 at the beginning of the war with Spain, he was given command of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The regiment was soon to be known as the “Rough Riders." Wood lead his men on the famous charge up San Juan Hill and was given a field promotion to brigadier general. In 1898 he was appointed the Military Governor of Santiago de Cuba. In 1920, as a retired Major General, Wood ran as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, losing to Warren Harding. In 1921 following his defeat, General Wood accepted the post of Governor General of the Philippines. He held this position from 1921 to 1927, when he died of a brain tumor in Boston, on 7 August 1927, at 66 years of age after which he was buried, with full honors, in Arlington National Cemetery.

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.

A few years ago I heard that a girl I knew from my hometown of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, had lost her husband to a brain tumor. They were high school sweethearts, prom king and queen, the perfect love story. His death devastated her, and her life fell apart for a while. But one day while in Broken Bow to visit my family, I happened to bump into her. I met her new husband and saw pictures of their two lovely kids. She'd found happiness and had a nice life. What about all those prayers for her first husband? The pleading and begging for God to save him while the tumor marched through him and put him in the ground? What if any of those prayers had been answered positively? Two children would not exist.

When the costumes came off, you saw the iniquity of illness more clearly. You saw its symptoms, or rather the invisibility thereof, and you could not resist trying to predict the poor child’s chances. An arm or a leg in a cast was not so bad. Often just a playground casualty that in eight weeks would have already faded into family lore. A port-wine stain covering half a face seemed much more unfair—although, with time and lasers, it too could be persuaded to fade. Harder to behold were the more structural disfigurements, like Microtia, Latin for little ear, or Ollier disease, a hyperproliferation of cartilage that could turn a hand as knobby and twisted as ginger root. I read about these and all manner of other disorders in the basement of the bioethics council, where a bookshelf jammed with medical dictionaries became my most reliable lunchtime companion. It wasn’t always easy to arrive at a diagnosis. The doctors at the hospital did not readily share their conclusions and, being a mere playtime volunteer, I generally did not feel in a position to ask. So I went on what I could see: Bulging joints. Buckling legs. Full-body tremors. What you could see could be apprehended. Leukemia, on the other hand, or a brain tumor, even one as big as a tangerine: their stealth was terrifying. It is not a logical theory. It is not even a theory. How can it be a theory when there are such blatant exceptions? Indisputably, there is no correlation between the visibility and severity of diseases, and yet the invisible ones have a special power. Maybe because they seem dishonest. Disingenuous. A birthmark may be unfortunate, but at least it doesn’t sneak up on you. So whenever I saw a new child coming through the lobby I could not help but search hopefully for a sign: of something tolerable, maybe even curable, like a sole that with a squirt of glue can be reattached to a shoe. Please, just don’t let it be attacking her from the inside out. Please don’t let her have one of the invisible things.