The Surgery And the Days After

My dad’s surgery was July 11, 2003, 19 days after his initial diagnosis. The surgeon was Dr. Scott Shapiro, the same guy who did Lance Armstrong’s brain surgery. The surgery began early in the morning and lasted six hours at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana.


We spent the previous night at my aunt and uncle’s house near Indianapolis, it was the first time we had visited their new house and even though we were there for a very scary and sad reason I remember just thinking how huge it was, and how cool it was that we were staying there. My mom, dad, and aunt all left the house around 3:30 that morning to go to the hospital that was about an hour away, my uncle left the house around 7:00 for work, and me and my cousins got up sometime later that morning for a long day of just messing around and trying to keep my mind off of things.

I don’t remember much of the day of my dad’s surgery, but I do remember the phone call from my mom saying he was out of the operating room and in recovery. I just remember the sound of pure joy and happiness in my mom’s voice on the phone.

The surgery lasted around six hours which is about how long the doctor’s said it would take to remove the egg-sized tumor. At the time of the surgery we did not yet know that the tumor was cancerous, but the doctor’s thought it was from the way it looked. We were extremely relieved that the surgery went well and that Dr. Shapiro was able to remove the entire tumor.

While the surgery was a success we still had a long road in front of us. Once the tests on the tumor were completed we learned that the tumor was an extremely aggressive and, the one adjective nobody wants to hear, cancerous tumor known as Glioblastoma Multiforme. When my mom and dad were told the tumor was cancerous and would probably return sometime in the next five years my dad said, “I’m going to beat this; God’s got more for me to do here.” My dad had watched his dad, my grandpa, die of prostate cancer just ten years earlier, in 1993. He still talks about how he watched my grandpa waste away and eventually pass, and how devastating it was for him to watch that.

Two days after the surgery, I finally got to go visit my dad at the hospital. I was happy to see him, but when I was there they had his bandages off which meant the wound was exposed, and to this day, seven years later, that is still one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. I almost threw up and it made me so uncomfortable that I actually had to leave until they got the wound redressed. Something else that really scared me was how different my dad looked without hair. That is all I remember about my dad immediately after the surgery.

This experience taught me that cancer was an extremely real thing that could change the way you look at somebody.