When My Husband Survived Brain Cancer, His Doctor Made 1 Suggestion. It Ended Up Changing My Life.
In December 2022, two weeks before Christmas, I found my husband, Ted, lying on the ground of our brand-new home, the house he had just finished building, unable to move.
A visit to a major Boston hospital would reveal a reasonable-to-doctors yet unfathomable-to-us answer to his change in personality, his sleep-filled days, his unbalanced saunter and his poor vision. He had been living with an inoperable brain tumor located deep in his thalamus, otherwise known as the control center of the brain, with links to motor skills, breathing functions and memory. To remove it meant the risk of paralysis, immobility and, scariest of all, death.
We were devastated, but hopeful. Ted was just happy to have explanations for the debilitating ailments he’d been living with for nearly a decade.
After emergency brain surgery, 16 rounds of radiation and 12 rounds of oral chemotherapy over the course of a year, Dr. Wen, a world-renowned neuro-oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, advised Ted to do this one thing that would help improve his memory and cognition: learn to play an instrument.
“Really?” We both looked at each other and laughed at the synchronicity. His doctor explained that taking up a new skill — specifically, playing an instrument — was nearly miraculous for both cognition and memory. I joked that horns were making a comeback in music these days, and that we should dust off his childhood trumpet and start practicing Miles Davis’ version of “It Never Entered My Mind.”
But getting up and moving was hard for Ted in those first few months of treatment. He was completely wiped, his body poisoned by the drugs that were saving him.
“I instantly feel old,” he professed one day when I asked what his new normal felt like.
When he had recovered enough to return to work, he did so willingly. He’s not the kind of guy who can sit around for long. But with working and trying to be present for our family, there wasn’t much wiggle room for him to take on another task, even if it did sound like a fun hobby.
The day he popped his last chemo pill is the day I popped my first antidepressant. I had become burned out, which resulted in my own seemingly insignificant health issues, comparatively. Headaches, fatigue, depression and anxiety were the results of stress that, like molten lava, had to erupt somehow after flowing into my nervous system so ferociously. I thought of what the doctor had said about learning an instrument and I took to the internet, immediately mesmerized by what I found.
I discovered that music has been used for years to not only create new neural pathways in the brain but to increase feelings of euphoria, help ease depression symptoms, and reduce the one thing I needed help with the most: stress.
I turned to the Yamaha sitting in our living room, used more as a decorative piece of furniture than an instrument, and decided to give it a shot. Serendipitously, it was a gift from Ted during our third Christmas together. I mentioned once how I had always loved the piano but never learned to play it and, voilà, it appeared out of thin air like the best kind of surprises do.
