By Becky Wiese
Brain surgery was certainly not on Jonathan Thompson’s mind when he started having dizzy spells in November 2014. The 25-year-old farmer and seed sales representative remembers, “Something just felt off, and the dizzy spells kept getting worse, eventually including nausea.” A week later, he found himself in the Emergency Department after falling due to his dizziness. He had hoped to get an MRI, but the ER doctor was ‘100 percent sure’ it was vertigo, and prescribed a 10-day steroid prescription.
“That seemed to help a little — it enabled me to feel well enough to go meet my girlfriend’s family for the first time and then be in my sister’s wedding the following weekend — so in hindsight, it was okay to not know what was going on, so I wasn’t freaking out during those events,” he says. The steroid had helped decrease the swelling in his brain for a period of time.
But the dizziness persisted, and he continued to seek medical help. “I went to an ENT doc because I thought maybe I had a pinched nerve in my neck from lifting weights and working out or something. Finally, I ended up at the eye doctor, who ordered an MRI.”
That’s when things really got stressful. Almost immediately after reading the MRI, the eye doctor called with the news that Jonathan had a tumor in his brain. After hearing this distressing news, Jonathan decided that he couldn’t wait to talk with a neurosurgeon until after the Thanksgiving holiday, so he tracked down Dr. Emilio Nardone, a neurosurgeon here in Bloomington, and asked for a few minutes of his time between surgeries.
Dr. Nardone spent some time with Jonathan and his family, explaining the type of tumor, and the procedure necessary to remove it. “At that point, he thought it was probably a grade two or three astrocytoma,” says Jonathan. “When I asked him how difficult the surgery would be on a scale of one to ten, I was thinking probably a nine. Dr. Nardone thought it was probably a two or three, so that gave me confidence that he knew what he was doing.”
“I found out on a Tuesday about the tumor, met with Dr. Nardone on Wednesday, and he performed surgery the following Thursday.” Not only did Jonathon have an experienced and highly capable surgeon, but he also benefitted from the experienced and skilled support personnel, and state-of-the-art technological equipment used to assist Dr. Nardone in surgery. And he didn’t have to leave his hometown.
Jonathan had a grade two astrocytoma, which was a lower grade than originally thought, but was complicated due to its location in the brain. “This was in a delicate part of the brain near the speech center,” explains Dr. Nardone. “The difficulty lay in finding the right balance of getting all the tumor, without being so aggressive that it would permanently affect Jonathan’s speech.”
Jonathan’s speech worsened after surgery, but he recovered most of it within the first two months post surgery through speech therapy, and a lot of hard work. He no longer has noticeable effects in his speech, although, “I still talk kind of fast, and sometimes get ahead of myself.”
Although he wouldn’t go so far as to be glad for his brain tumor, Jonathan does feel it has been a blessing in disguise. “It gave me a better perspective on life. Before, it was all about me, me, me; and I took little things for granted, like speech.” Since his surgery, he has gone on a mission trip to Guatemala, and become more “other” centered.
It’s been life changing — in a good way. An indirect and unexpected, but very real, result of brain surgery.
Next month: “Critical Timing of Brain Tumors”
Central Illinois Neuro Health Sciences is located at 1015 S. Mercer Avenue in Bloomington. For more information, or to schedule a consultation, you may contact them at 309-662-7500 or through their website, www.cinhs.com.