Normally, I would have had to wait a long time to get an appointment with the neurologist—but fortunately, my mom had a friend who worked in the neurologist’s office. She was able to get me an appointment right away. They performed all of the normal scans, and then pulled me back into the neurologist’s office.

“This is very interesting,” the neurologist said. “You don’t see this very often at all.”

It turned out that I didn’t have a brain tumor after all—I had four brain tumors.

He put the tumors on the big screen—he showed us each one with his pointer.

“If it’s there,” my mother asked, “could it be in the rest of her body?”

“Possibly,” he said.

As I heard this news, I wasn’t fazed at all. I am a cookie-cutter Type A personality—very practical, and not very emotional. My reaction was more, “Here’s the situation—what are we going to do about it?”

In other words, I was okay. My mom was not.

We went downstairs to get a chest x-ray. My mom was crying, and I was attempting to console her.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Don’t cry—it’s not a big deal.”

A few days after my chest x-ray, I went in for an MRI, where they were going to scan me from head to toe. The process ended up taking six hours, because I got fidgety and they had to redo them. I was in a tube where the top was less than an inch from my nose.

A few days after my MRI, I had to have my spinal fluid taken. Although I had been relatively calm so far, something about that procedure wigged me out. Perhaps because it was on my back, and I wouldn’t be able to see it. After the procedure, I had to lay flat on my back for eight hours; if I sat up at all, my spinal fluid could leak out, which would cause a shift to my central nervous system. 

When I was in bed after my spinal tap, my mom’s friend who works with the neurologist brought me a stuffed bear; that bear accompanied me to every single hospital visit after that.

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