Craniopharyngioma - Alex Vardy

Craniopharyngioma is a type of brain tumor in which my mother was diagnosed in 2004. This type of brain tumor causes symptoms that can mimic other illnesses and diseases. Symptoms that can occur while acquiring this tumor can experience vomiting, strokes, narrow vision, loss of hearing and loss of vision permanently as well as neurological disorders. Individuals can easily be diagnosed with this type of tumor are to have an MRI Scan, a CT Scan or a PET scan. To treat this, you can have a procedure called Brachytherapy (implanting radiation) into the tumor; have powerful gamma shocks (for a couple of minutes) in the infected area –meaning cutting open the skull to expose the area- or to have chemotherapy. Brain tumors are common in children (2nd most common type of cancer), and adults at the age of 70 and above. It is still unclear on what creates a brain tumor. Scientists still rule out that cell phones increase the risk of getting this because there is no link between each. They theorize that having gliomas that ran down in the family may have an impact on this illness. I will be talking about how it will affect the quality of life, the friends and family around you and the financial problems.

Living with Craniopharyngioma can really depress you. Either you knowing you have it or not, it will destroy your way of thought in life. Knowing you cannot go out for long, ruins your social life. My mother, for instance, became quite anxious in the beginning, wanting to know what is causing her to feel very nauseous and to vomit once a week. It then progressed to 2-3 times then to 3-4 times a week with other symptoms coming along like narrow vision and always felt extremely sleepy with having long deep sleeps. We would consistently go to our family doctor but he always prescribed her different pills of some kind but nothing worked. His final theory was that, she had physiological problems and she needed to go therapy. By now, we had given hopes on finding an answer from our family doctor, so my father found a medical book hiding in our bookshelf, and searched up symptoms causes and brain tumor popped up as a probable cause. We then took her to have an MRI scan which thus solving our question.

It’s obvious that if one of your close family members is diagnosed with a brain tumor or cancer they would feel emotionally torn up as well as yourself. You would not know how long that person has left to live, what permanent scars they might acquire if not treated soon, and how you would feel if they were to disappear from your life so soon. I was 10 when I was told by my dad that my mother had a brain tumor. She was at Taiwan already in the hospital which made me feel considerably relieved that she can get immediate help. It was near the end of summer vacation for us kids so we flew probably the next weekend to Taiwan to see our mother maybe for the last time. We got to see her in the hospital with all, if not most, of her family members there as well. I still remember the day when she was hours away from the operation. My brother and I were crying profusely because we knew that there was this potential risk of not ever talking to her again (the success chance was 80%). I remember my grandma and my aunties also felt our agony but we were comforted by them and our uncles that were there. We then left her room, and one of my uncle took us into his home, fed us, given us a place to live for the next couple of days. Half a day later, we were told that the operation was successful and that make me personally relieved.

We were financially safe. It was expensive, but it was a reduced price because the MRI Scan was taken place in Canada, and there was no need to have another scan. It did cost my Grandpa 250,000 TWD ($8,500 CAD) for my mother to have the operation. Money wasn’t the problem since he became very wealthy from selling a lot of farm land to people when the price in farming land was high. But for others though, like people who do not have that kind of money, they would have to get an enormous loan to have the operation in places like the US. There is no medication prescribed when you have a brain tumor but you would have a yearly MRI checkup which was free in Canada so, that’s a plus for us.

The reason why I chose to do Craniopharyngioma is because it had a huge impact in my life. It showed me that you can really get emotional when some catastrophe like this tumor, has on you and people that are friends with that person. It certainly helped me feel more sympathetic on how others with the same illness and other illnesses because I know how they would feel. We also fired that family doctor for being so useless and we sent him a letter of telling him how useless he actually was. We got a new family doctor a week later.

By: Alex Vardy

Websites:
- http://www.braintumor.org/research/
- http://www.nabraintumor.org/facts.html
- http://www.medicinenet.com/brain_tumor/page4.htm
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0004485
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_tumor
- http://www.brain-tumor.org/208_Craniopharyngioma.html

Blog:
- http://www.sandybeardsley.com/index.html
- http://www.crmagazine.org/archive/SpringSummer2010/Pages/BrainTumorSurvivorBlog.aspx