Jim Tennermann

I remember it clearly. I somehow ended up at the hospital into the emergency room and they did an imaging test and I was lying on a bed in the hallway and a neurologist comes out and says, Mr. Tennermann, you have a brain tumour. And I sat bolt upright and and screamed, No, I won't redo the scream here. 

But I was about 36. In 1967, my father died from a brain tumour. And I always had it in my mind that if any such thing should happen to me, there's no way I was going to let anyone tamper with my brain. I changed that opinion the day I got that diagnosis. So, yes, I was in a state of disbelief for a couple of days. Hard to process. I'm pretty sure it's hard to process for most people. I called my brother, who also lived in Boston at the time, and he was in the city where the hospital I was treated at is located, and he ran out of his office and came to see me and we just looked at each other and shook our heads. So that's how it started. 

And on that day, there were actually two different tumours diagnosed, one large one and a smaller one just over my right eye again inside the skull. The first surgery was kind of extreme. The tumour was large. If you think about something like a hamburger, it was about that size, my word. So that went really well. And about seven months later, the second tumour was removed. I felt like an experienced patient at that time since I had been to the neurosurgery. And it did go really well and I was discharged in like three days. It seemed like things were back to normal, except for some odd scars. I assume that was the end of it, and it really was the end of it for a few years. So I would go back for an MRI first every six months and then every year

And then we just stopped after maybe six years. So one day I was into my annual checkup seeing my primary care physician, and he said, You know, we haven't done a seat of your brain in quite some time. I'm going to schedule that. And he did. And I had that imaging test and that doctor called me up and said, Jim, you have a brain tumour. That's like a replay of the entire scenario. There was not quite as disturbed as I was the first time around, but it was pretty shocking. That led to two additional craniotomies before they could get that thing out. I'm a cyclist and I have been for a long time. With the first diagnosis in 1995, it was a rough in June and I couldn't work for a couple of months. But I did get on a bicycle and I thought that I could ride myself back to health, and I pretty much did. So my first effort was on a stationary bike in the home I lived in that lasted about 60 seconds, and I just went to bed and went to sleep. After that I realised that the body needs time to heal. 

But if you do something extreme and run or get a lot of exercise, your energy gets diverted to those muscular needs and away from your healing. Bad idea. I would advise anyone post-operative to not get on an exercise machine right away. But as days went by, I did get on a bicycle and went a little farther every day. And one day I rode my bicycle to my office, which was 12 miles away. It was a beautiful summer day, and I remember stopping on a hill near a farm and looking out over the landscape and thinking, I'm back. And many cyclists are obsessed with metrics as I am. I have details of every ride I've been on since the early 1990s. I don't know why I'm obsessed, but it is a way that you can measure yourself and your progress and it's a little easier to do that than it is to see a doctor every now and then and get their updates. So that has been good for me, I think to find a passion and to stick with it. It is good for most people. As a cyclist, I found I didn't have the power to get on a bicycle again, which made me almost depressed. It was just such a terrible thing. I tried so many times and I was saved by a neighbour, another cyclist who had an e-bike and he said, Why don't you try this? It was a mountain bike. And I got on his bike and thought I'd ride around the block. It made enough power that I could ride it without having to stop to catch my breath. So I meant to ride around the block. But I went into the local forest and I came back 40 minutes later. It was as if life had been renewed. So that's been great for me. That and the guitar keep me going. 

One of the challenges of being the cancer patient is people say you're a fighter or if you're not doing so well, you need to fight harder. And frankly, it irritates me to hear someone say to me, you need to fight harder. It's not that easy. And I don't think it's about a fight. So metaphorically, I would say that a fight has to have outcomes: you win or you lose. So you're fighting all the time. It's a binary outcome. And you would think that if that were your only option, you eventually get tired and lose. Now, whether that's exactly true or not, physically, I think it's a psychological position that doesn't feel good. And I have learned over the years that fighting is part of it and you need to do that sometimes. And other times you need to just dodge it for a while. Sometimes you need to embrace it, sometimes you need to swim with it, swim upstream, swim cross stream. It's a part of you. And it's not really an alien who has descended and somehow invaded your body.

 It took me a year to wrap my head around what this book would look like, and I have decided that I want it to be. A short and succinct handbook for people who have this diagnosis. Because you don't always know what to do and there are some things you need to do, and these are the things that you are rarely told by others when you receive a diagnosis that has the word cancer in it. Everything changes in a second. Many people feel like they have been pushed off the cliff. They can't even finish their conversation with the doctor who gave them that diagnosis. I have confirmed this with many people who've had that diagnosis and many doctors. I realised that what happened to me in 1995 is I was wracked with self-pity and it's a kind of terrible thing. You know, you look out the window and it happened to be summer in Boston at that time. And people are out there in T-shirts and looking good and starting to get a tan. And I'm sitting in the room going, Why me? What did I do to deserve this? And, you know, when you have that in your mind, it crowds out everything else. And at that time, you need to be preparing for a journey that you're not prepared for. I in this book will advise people who have received that diagnosis that the first thing they need to do is get a grip on themselves. You need to have both feet firmly on the ground because you need the full use of your brain. You need to make decisions. You need to listen and you need to learn. And you can't really do that when you're buried in self-pity. So fortunately, there are some easy ways. There's some actual simple and easy ways to kind of stop that self-pity in its tracks. So that's the first thing. And then it progresses through other subjects.