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Tumours Grow

7 years ago564 words

I went to have my brain tumour looked at again. Looks like it's worse news than usual this time.

The day itself was quite an ordeal. The MRI machine was broken, so I had to sit around in some flimsy hospital gown for half an hour while a swarm of nurses tried to fix it. Half way through the scan, I had to have some luminous fluid injected into my elbow... but it failed because my vein "burst" (to use the nurse's word), so I had to have an injection in the other arm instead (meaning I had twice as many as usual). On the way back, one of the trains was cancelled, so I had to wander around an unfamiliar city looking for another train station, which had an enormously long line of other people doing the same thing; I was queuing for another half an hour. That train stopped a couple of stations before it should have done because one of the passengers passed out or something, and everyone poured off and (oddly, I thought) sort of crowded around her as she lay on the floor with a couple of bewildered train staff looming awkwardly over her. What an adventure.

Anyway. It wasn't good news. It's never been good news, though. At the previous checkups that I've had, the news I've got has usually been that it was the same as last time. Neutral. This time, it had grown a bit. Not a huge amount, but crucially it seems to be either pressing against or beginning to consume (I'm unsure, though likely - hopefully - the former) a brain region called the ∞ thalamus ∞ in one of my hemispheres. This is a very important part of the brain, and if the tumour continues to grow into it, then that's bad news for me.

But as I said in my previous post, getting the tumour out seems to require cutting through the corpus callosum: the thick bridge of fibres that connects the two hemispheres. Originally I thought they'd cut like a centimetre of it at most, and was worried about that... but it seems like they'd cut about half of it, which is not exactly something I want to happen. While it's not like they'll be cutting all of it, that's as reassuring as being told "oh, don't worry, we're only going to be lopping a couple of inches off your todger! You'll still have some of it left!"

As far as the surgeons and such are concerned, operations involving the partial severance of that bridge are fine because it doesn't produce any terrible obvious side effects. As long as you can still walk and talk afterwards, you're fine in their eyes. But my concern is how it'd affect more subtle, less quantifiable and obvious things, like intelligence and creativity. Much of what I do and enjoy involves the integration of language with feeling and abstraction, and they're largely in separate hemispheres. With the corpus callosum at least partly cut, 'data transfer' between them would be significantly hindered, and so too might be everything that I do that I consider worthwhile.

So it seems that my fate is sealed. I'll probably be getting that operation sometime around July, after I've graduated from this undergraduate degree. That'll be my future, and it's not really avoidable.

Hmm.