He waka eke noa! Brain Tumour Support NZ’s call to the nation Mandy Bathan Chairperson, Brain Tumour Support NZ
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n September 2017 I was 53 and living a busy life as a primary school teacher, helping five-year-old children to learn maths and to read and write . As a mother of three children who were sort of grown up - one married, one working and one at university – I had a regular life most of us would recognise involving paying bills, juggling schedules and being with my grandson . The only contact I’d ever had with brain tumours were the sort of thing portrayed on slick American hospital TV shows where impossibly good-looking surgeons and an assemblage of equally beautiful staff would perform last minute lifesaving miracles to the satisfaction of themselves and of course me the viewer . The end credits would roll by and for me, give or take a few road bumps, life was a place of children’s laugher as well as dealing with the usual minutiae of life .
Mandy and her dog, Frankie, walking on Ngarunui Beach, Raglan, New Zealand
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Brain Tumour
Then abruptly and without warning things changed . I was diagnosed with an oligodendroglioma .
A new journey starts My new chapter began with only the vaguest of symptoms . There were no blinding headaches or seizures (or so I thought) . Only difficult-to-explain ‘weird sensations .’ On the gut feeling of my local GP, I was referred for an EEG and then subsequently for a ‘routine’ MRI which everybody agreed was a good option ‘to discount anything sinister’ . However, the results rapidly changed my life, and I was swept into a sequence of hospital gowns, blood draws and technicians working to the cacophony of shrieks and rowdy bangs of MRI machines . Life became a cycle of earplugs in, claustrophobic masks on, breathe in, breathe out, medication taken, dye
injected, moving, or being moved . I had morphed from a woman made of feelings and flesh into a patient of light and shadows . I was now forever to be attended to by quietly spoken nurses as well as a range of specialist surgeons, whose roles had previously only been familiar to me from TV hospital dramas . My new life also included the sounds of various monitors and devices whose beeping, squawking, and buzzing would orchestrate themselves with the harsh flat light of hospital wards . In my previous life, the word ‘oligodendroglioma’ would have earned a twenty-two-point Scrabble score, now it earned a fearsome reputation as a term to be both feared and studied . An operation was scheduled and after several false starts caused by a pesky overactive thyroid, I had the six-hour resection of my tumour . At least, the surgeon called it a resection but stressed