Masha’s Brain: A Mother’s Intuition
Eileen Stukane
The back of Masha’s head, where the tumor was removed
Word Count 984
I took my daughter, Masha, to her pediatrician when the vomiting started. “It’s the flu,” said the doctor. Five days later, the nausea and vomiting continuing every morning with no change in sight, I called the doctor again. “A flu can last 10 days,” she said.
On Day 11, I brought Masha back to the pediatrician’s office. “This is not the flu,” I told her. The doctor examined my daughter and said she wanted her to see a psychiatrist as teenage girls can often turn to certain behaviors to lose weight. My New-York-City-sophisticated daughter heard that and said “I am not making myself throw up.” My daughter is not a secretive teenager. I knew she was not bulimic. I knew in my soul that she was telling the truth.
The pediatrician stood firm in her conclusion. I told her that Masha was seeing a therapist for testing anxiety. I was sure her therapist would disagree with this assessment, so I gave the pediatrician the therapist’s phone number. We had an appointment that same day.
The therapist greeted us with, “I concur with the pediatrician.” I was shocked and flummoxed. “How could you?” I asked. “My daughter is open and articulate. She is not a binge-eater or an over-exerciser, nor is she bulimic.” The therapist was not moved even though she had known Masha for three years. So now I had two professionals telling me my daughter’s vomiting and a new, strange loss of balance was because of an eating disorder.
Masha began to miss her 8th Grade classes. The few times I sent her to school, she found herself walking into lockers rather than heading straight down a hall. She was also throwing up, which caused the school to send her home. Strangely, her mornings were awful, but she always felt better by early evening and could eat a full dinner. The pediatrician and the therapist were both gone from our lives. At that point, I had lost faith in the professionals. What could I rely on? The answer, of course, was the mind that told me the doctors were wrong in the first place -- the neural network housed in my own head.
Late at night, I typed my daughter’s symptoms into a Google search. I went from health site to health site without finding an answer to the question of what was wrong with her. I was about to give up when I clicked on a chat room filled with parents describing their children’s illnesses, symptoms, and treatments. One man wrote that his daughter, younger than mine, was nauseous and throwing up early in the day but hungry and happily eating dinner every night. This had been going on for weeks. Right below this father’s posting, a mother commented that he should take his daughter to a neurologist right away. Her son had had these symptoms, and he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. My fingers no longer felt the keyboard. My entire body went numb. My face and neck began sweating. Rivulets dribbled down my chest. Could she have a brain tumor?
I zombie-walked into the bedroom where my husband was half-asleep. I lowered my body to the edge of the bed and breathed as best I could. “I think our daughter might have a brain tumor,” I said. He lifted his head from the pillow, “If she does,” he said, “we will find out tomorrow.”
An MRI discovered a brain tumor. The pediatric neurologists (we went to more than one) told us that the tumor, in the back of her head, low down near the base of her brainstem, did not look like the cancerous kind, but, of course, you never know until you know. One doctor held Masha’s index finger, placed it on the tumor image illuminated on a suspended light box. “You see this?” he asked. “We’re going to take this out, and then you will feel better.” Walking out of the medical building she asked for a cat, a request she had made multiple times before, but this time we agreed.
When you have a child diagnosed with a brain tumor, pediatric neurosurgeons will see you in a nanosecond, at least that is how it felt to me. At the start of my daughter’s symptoms, I lived in slow motion. Now, I was traveling at full speed. We met with surgeons who were all competent and smart, but I wanted my daughter to select her doctor. She should feel that the person who was going to open her skull was someone she trusted. Our disappointment in two professionals ought not to extend to all doctors. When the pediatric neurosurgeon at New York-Presbyterian hospital walked into the examining room, we all knew he was the one. He preternaturally glowed in his white coat, and he was smiling. Also remarkable, the pediatric neurologist who accompanied him was the son of one of my husband’s old friends. The intuition that makes you wary, also does the opposite by bestowing trust.
After a five-and-a-half-hour operation, the surgeon met us in the waiting room. “It’s not cancer,” he said. My daughter’s body had created a nonmalignant Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma. Her tumor was in the area of the brain that orchestrates autonomic reflexes– blinking, swallowing, breathing, and vomiting. I did not even know the brain had a vomit center until this very delicate and complex operation was over.
When Masha was finally able to return to school, she carried a photo of her tumor taken in the operating room. She was her own “Show-and-Tell.” As for me, this story is my “Show-and-Tell,” a story about listening to the voice in your head that tells you which way to go. In spite of all that we hear about the advancement of artificial intelligence today, we already hold in our bodies the life-saving power of the human brain, and the intuition that goes with it.
Eileen is at work on It's Always A Secret, a book about her year-long experience emptying out the house of hoarders (to be published by Rowman & Littlefield). She is also the author of Running on Two Different Tracks, a 2015 e-book memoir (https://amazon.to/2SbGgbV), and from time to time, you might see her on assignment in downtown Manhattan covering local political and community issues as a reporter for ChelseaCommunityNews.com.