Jeannie Gaffigan: Finding comedy in a brain tumor | Big Think
This kind of all started pretty quickly when I was taking my kids to the pediatrician, and I was super busy, and I had to fill out all these forms for my kids. But my pediatrician noticed that I was like leaning to hear her, and she said, "What’s wrong with your left ear?" and I said, "I just can’t really hear out of it." She was like, "How long has that been happening?" and I was like, "No idea." And so she said, "Well, that’s not good."
So she referred me to an ENT, and she was like, "You’re going to go follow up for this," and I was like, "I wasn’t, but now I will." And she said, "I want to hear what they say." So then I felt like I had an assignment, and I’m kind of a rule follower, so I followed up with the ENT. He didn’t see anything wrong, put me on a round of steroids, and told me to follow up with him in a month. And then the pediatrician was like, "Did you follow up?" and I’m like, "I’m going back."
So I went back, and he was like, "You know, you might have something that I can’t see because I don’t really see anything in your ear, and there’s no reason that you should have this hearing loss because everything is functioning properly in your eardrum based on all the tests that they did." And he thought I might have like an acoustic neuroma or some kind of small tumor inside my ear where he can’t see. He’s like, "It’s a one in a – what did he say – ten million chance that you have an acoustic neuroma, but we just want to rule it out."
So he sent me to get an MRI, and then I got the MRI, and they saw like a pear-sized brain tumor on my brainstem that was like in need of an immediate operation. And we really did not know what was going to become of me, like, really quick. So I had a couple of days to kind of mull that over, and in my book I really talk about what that period of time was like when I was kind of facing this. You know, just when you feel like you can’t add anything else to your to-do list, all of a sudden something happens where nothing on your to-do list matters anymore. It was the first time in my life that something like that had happened to me.
So for some reason, when I knew I was going to have brain surgery on Monday, and I was in the MRIs all day and cat scans and everything all day on Friday at the hospital, I felt this incredible peace like, "Oh, thank God I know what I have." I don’t know why, but I felt that way because it was so much better than not knowing what I had.
So there was a period of time when I was in this MRI tube for hours, and it was hours. It was like there’s just going to be a three-hour test. I was like, "Oh, okay." And it was so loud. It sounded like somebody was using a jackhammer to get me out, like I was trapped, and they were trying to get me out, but you can’t move. I was like, "Are these sounds right?"
And all of a sudden everything struck me as so hilarious, and that it was so ironic that the sounds were so loud, but I was like had hearing loss in one of my ears. But the loud sounds were in the other ear, but I wouldn’t have been able to hear it on this side, and I was like, "It’s like rain on your wedding day." You know, I was just making all these observations. So eventually, they take me out of the tube. It ejects like automatically, and Jim is there, and he’s like, "Are you okay?"
And I was like, "Write this down. Write this whole story down because it is so funny." And I think that he reminded me of that because after that a couple of days went by, and then I had brain surgery, and then it was like, you know, the shit hit the fan for like six weeks. He told me, he was like, "You were writing comedy routines in the MRI tube." And I was like, "I was." And he’s like, "Yes."
So a lot of the time when I was in the hospital, when I couldn’t really sit up or speak or really speak. I mean, I could whisper. There were people who were really close to me and my nurse Joe, who I write about in the book, who I rave about in the book, and I had a big crush on in a hospital way. Like, "My nurse is here." That he could understand what I was talking about, but there were a lot of like lists and comments and observations that...