This article written by Barbara K. Lipska, a neuroscientist and the director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health, was unlike any of the other articles that I have read in this class and was very compelling a little scary to think about. What called me from the page was the following, “The M.R.I. scan later that day showed that I indeed had a small brain tumor that was bleeding and blocking my right visual field. I was told it was metastatic melanoma and given what was, in effect, a death sentence. I was a scientist, a triathlete, a wife, mother and grandmother. Then one day my hand vanished, and it was over.” This was a shocking revelation that all of a sudden you could one day not be okay. The thought of my brain being taken over by “tumors, inflammation and severe swelling” causing me to not even be able to see limbs of my body was chilling. Lipska’s piece is so dark and yet is written in the lightest almost playful tone that makes the subject matter easier to swallow. The way she describes, so matter of factly, the strange things that her condition made her do make them almost funny rather then scary for example, “I got lost driving home from work on a route I had taken for decades. I went running in the woods outside my house, barely dressed.” The most alarming part of the article was what I read between the lines. This very highly educated woman, who daily worked with people dealing with mental illness, studying the signs of onset, treatment and symptoms, did not know until almost too late that she was suffering from a nearly fatal condition in her brain. Surley, I thought, she would be familiar with signs of something wrong and take them seriously but instead her thought process was a lot like what I assume mine would be. “I had battled breast cancer in 2009 and melanoma in 2012, but I had never considered the possibility of a brain tumor. I knew immediately that this was the most logical explanation for my symptoms, and yet I quickly dismissed the thought. Instead I headed to a conference room.” The question that this article raised to me was not about the symptoms and effects of her conditions, although those were terrifying, but it is if this highly educated woman did not know about a condition in her body in a region in which she specialized, then how would someone like me know if something were fatally wrong with my body?
I wrote that this was one of my favorite articles we studied on the Past Posts Activity worksheet. However, I feel like my writing was sub-par at best on this CRQ. I think my formatting is off, my grammar is all over the place and my thoughts are scattered. I think I had good base thoughts and insight but need to find a better way to get them out in this writing.