Median survival time
I recently sat down to catch up with a great friend. After a while he asked, “So what’s the deal with the cancer?” “Didn’t you read the email-update Brett sent?” I said. “I don’t read that bullshit,” he said. “That’s for the people you don’t know as well as me.” I laughed at what he...
Reading list
Have a brain tumor or other neurological disorder? Interested in how the brain works? Want to kick ass and defeat your disease? Check out some of the books on my reading list. (This list will be updated as I finish new books.) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee An Anthropologist...
Laughing in the face of the “worst-case scenario”
Hey, everyone. I have a new $5 word for you: nystagmus. Now, before you run off to look it up on Wikipedia, give me a chance to tell my story. Over the past six weeks I have been experiencing a weird sensation when I look at something up close, including my cell phone, books and,...
The post for kids who can’t read good
(Note: The title of this blog is a reference to the movie Zoolander.) I started my 16th cycle of Temodar last night. I am down to 200mg per day. I wonder if this will be a breeze, or if I will still feel crappy by the end of the week – like usual. On a...
Emerson on brain disorder
Living with severe dementia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, responded to a question about his health in a Liz-like manner: “I have lost my mental faculties but I am perfectly well.”
Keeping time
I found a legitimate explanation for why I bode well during an MRI and often fall asleep. There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals. John Iverson, a neuroscientist and an avid drummer, has pointed this out. We tend...
More than meets the eye
I just finished reading The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. This book taught me about 50% of what I know about the brain. If you haven’t seen me lately, don’t even talk to me about the human brain because it’s my favorite topic and I won’t...
Cancer treatment for dummies
Note: I feel guilty most of my links refer you to Wikipedia articles, but they’re usually great overviews for a topic. It’s official: I begin chemotherapy next Monday! It seems like a weird thing to be excited about, but I’ve been intrigued by this whole “brain cancer/tumor” thing all along. To begin with, neurology is...
