Thread by @kasie

🧵 Today marks one year since my brain surgery @PennMedicine to remove a brain tumor.

Today I am humbled to be able to say I am completely healthy and can physically live my life as though it never happened

But I can’t lead my life like it never did. I have learned so much

I was 36 years old when I was diagnosed. By the time I got to this day, when they drew the sharpie line to show where to cut, I had spend weeks planning what life would look like for my loved ones — my then 2-year-old son — without me in it

It’s not an experience I would wish on anyone. But I have to tell you — I am so grateful now to understand the things I was forced to grapple with because of the tumor growing in my head

Most people aren’t forced to grapple with the real possibility they’ll be gone when they are still otherwise young and healthy — when they still have most of their expected lives left to live

And so most people don’t have the chance to *change* how they live

There’s a huge difference between intellectually *knowing* your life is fragile and could change in an instant — and actually facing it, sitting with it, and deeply understanding, through that experience, what it is that actually matters to you

Because if you deeply *know* you might not wake up tomorrow, or you might learn you have very little time left on this earth, the clarity is sudden, all consuming, and life changing

I did wake up from my surgery, and a few days later I learned I was one of the lucky ones: the tumor was benign and the surgery was most likely the hardest part of my journey. Most brain tumor patients are not so lucky, as I knew going in and have learned further since

(I’ve been asked to do advocacy work for brain tumors and brain cancer, and I always feel I have to explain I didn’t go through what others did — only to be told, well, there are so few brain tumor survivors, we need your voice. 💔)

The things I learned that my heart can no longer forget are the things so many of us know but often fail to act on in a focused, daily way: The people we love and the health of our bodies matters more than anything else ever can or will

Showing up for them and for ourselves is what will give us the kind of joy we are seeking in so many other, and ultimately misguided, places

Our health includes meaningful work — whether it’s the work itself or the act of working to sustain the people that you love

But work for the sake of vanity, or the approval of others, or the pursuit of money beyond security—no. Our society may reward those things. Certainly my industry does. But this is not what will matter to you when you are staring death in the face.

No. What will matter are the people you will no longer be able to know or matter to. I thought about my son’s future graduation, yes. But I also thought about not being there when he comes home from school upset over being bullied, or proud of getting an A.

I thought about not being able to give my son a sibling. I thought of my husband having to be a parent on his own, having to start over, of not being able to show up for him when he has a bad day at work or loses a parent or a friend. I thought about my parents losing a child.

And it’s those things — showing up, every day, in big but mostly in small ways — for the people I love — that I too often sacrificed in my life without even truly grappling with or understanding what I was giving up.

I don’t live my life that way any more. I refuse to. And I am just so grateful to God and to everyone in my life who carried me through this trial and brought me to this changed place.

I am a better person for it. I am a better journalist for it. My empathy for people facing health challenges, chronic pain and illness, aging — it’s expanded in ways I never could have understood

I can never thank enough the family, friends, and doctors who brought me through this. I owe them all a debt of gratitude that I will carry with me always (below with @DanielYoshor)

I would never wish what I went through on anyone. But I’m sharing this today in hopes that maybe someone out there will see it and maybe it will change how they see the world just a little bit. That they can learn something without having to face anything like this.

I wish I had lived this way every day without having to go through this. But I am so grateful to be here, now, with most of my life still ahead of me, understanding something most people don’t have the chance to see until it is too late.

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