Today's vocabulary word, ladies and gentlemen, is schwannoma. It sounds like it might be a delicious Middle Eastern sandwich, but it is, in fact, a slow-growing benign tumor that develops from the Schwann cells.
I happen to have a schwannoma in my brain, and at this time next week, if you're listening at the regularly scheduled time, I will be waking up from having the schwannoma excised at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. At least I hope I'll be waking up.
One has to search hard to find the positive side of brain surgery, but here's one. You can take control of the conversation for at least a couple minutes. Bring up any other medical problem, say, knee replacement, which I've had, or prostate removal, which I've also had, and you will invariably be interrupted because the person with whom you're conversing has either had it, knows a relative or close friend who had it, or is about to have it. Ah, but brain surgery, much rarer.
In my conversations about my upcoming procedure, I've yet to encounter another schwannoma-ist, although I know they're out there. A visit to YouTube will unearth a whole universe of brain surgery graduates from which I detected an unsurprising pattern. In the videos produced by hospitals and/or doctors, the patients emerge unscathed from surgery, preparing bouillabaisse and solving complicated quadratic equations just days after getting drilled in the cranium.
In the personal testimonies, however, one of the most interesting is from actor Mark Ruffalo, by the way, different pictures emerge, a gumbo of reactions to brain surgery, facial paralysis, headaches that linger for a year or more, extreme dry eye, on and on. There's also an entire literature devoted to bizarre goings-on in that complicated center of life we know as the brain. I was once a fan of the work of Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who specialized in chronicling extraordinary brain disorders. His most famous book was probably 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,' one chapter of which chronicled a man with visual agnosia, a condition in which he could not identify objects. When he was leaving Sacks' exam room one day, he grabbed his wife's head, thinking it was his hat.
I should note that Sacks later retracted some of his findings, which do stretch the limits of imagination.
But look, strange things happen when you start rooting around in the brain. The story of Michael Boatwright, a man from Florida who awoke with a peculiar form of amnesia, has been largely verified. Boatwright was found unconscious in a motel and awoke speaking Swedish and answering only to the name of Johan Ek. I have no desire to lose my identity, but it would be kind of neat to wake up and be able to speak Swedish.
In the event that anyone out there listening is dealing with an acoustic neuroma or some other brain disorder, I offer some background. I first became alerted to a problem when I found out that my hearing in one ear, in my case, my right, was deteriorating. I didn't take it all that seriously at first. I joke with my grandkids I didn't want to hear what they were saying anyway, but then I started to feel dizzy much of the time, which prompted an MRI, which prompted another MRI, and the revelation that my schwannoma, not my sharona, had doubled in size.
Radiation was ruled out because my tumor was as much diffuse as solid, and so after a couple other consults, I will find myself next Wednesday morning lying on an OR table for as much as seven hours of hopefully deep anesthetic sleep and cranial exploration. I'm going in with confidence and positive attitude and the hope that I'll emerge calling myself Bjorn.
And so this is Jack McCallum for WDIY, signing off with the words, "Önska mig lycka till," which is Swedish for wish me luck.
