Ray of Hope

Enter Sheldon Z. Goldberg. He is an oncologist. He is from Brooklyn. His glasses are smudgy and his pale blue eyes dart up toward the ceiling when he talks. He’s confused by my little friend in my brain. But everyone is. And I like him.

I paraphrase, but his initial thoughts: 

You have a Medulloblastoma (ger-duh!). It is a tumor that normally afflicts children, actually, babies. It is left-over embryonic cells that usually die after birth, but sometimes they live on and lay dormant. When your immune system is compromised, they are opportunists and start reproducing – in your brain. But it’s not all doom and gloom. I’d say we have more than a glimmer of hope, we have a ray of hope in treating this.

Then he rattled off a bunch of statistics showing 50%, 75% and 95% success rates with this kind of tumor, exploratory treatments, top docs …

So, with my parasitic evil twin growing in my brain, we set our sites on excising Mini-Me. As I told my pregnant friend, “Hey, I’m pregnant too! But I have to get an abortion…”

Tears of certain doom dried and abandoned, Kimmie, Don, Jack and I left Goldberg’s office with literally, a new lease on life.