As my next MRI approached, I was smelling everything I could get my nose on. Stopping to smell the roses took on an urgent, somewhat existential meaning.

I know that in terms of tumors, I’m very lucky. Everyone who has looked at my MRIs has concluded that the tumor is likely benign. Too many friends and acquaintances of mine in just the past few years have battled various late-stage cancers and other challenging illnesses, and some have lost their battles. Others have been through extensive chemo and radiation treatments and have come through on the other side victorious but battered. I can’t compare what I’m going through to their journeys.

But I could mourn my own impending loss. When I got home from the April 2024 appointment, I told my husband what the doctors said.

“At least it’s not your sight. At least it’s not cancer,” he said.

Hmmm, true, and I’m grateful for that. Gee, thanks, honey.

My parents love me, but they are from a generation that tells you to just suck it up, you’re not special, everybody has problems. When I told them – separately, because they’ve been divorced for more than 40 years – that I was going to lose my sense of smell, they both said, “I can’t smell anything!” I got very little sympathy.

I asked my mom, “Is that really true? You can’t smell anything?”

“Well, I can’t smell lilacs at all. They were always my favorite flower.”

“What if you shove your nose into them?”

“I can smell that a little.”

I’d just like the chance to go through the normal process of losing my senses slowly as I age, not having nearly one-third of my senses severed entirely with a surgical knife, one hundred percent, never to work again. I imagine what that’s like. To never smell chocolate. Coffee. Pine trees. A baby’s head. A big pot of soup. Onions. Garlic. Pesto. The difference between good wine and bad wine. Sour milk. Farts. Gas leaks.

I decided to pin all my hopes on radiation. At least, I did until I met with the radiation oncologist in October of 2024, right after my next MRI.

Irradiating a tumor in the middle of your head comes with a complex set of expected and potential complications. First of all, there will definitely be hair loss and burns on the skin. I don’t care about the hair so much, but this made me realize that if that was the damage you could see, what would be happening to everything between my skin and the tumor – my brain, eyes, brain, glands, brain, nerves, brain, muscles…

The doctor told me that he could probably save some of my sense of smell, but that over time I would probably lose more and more, and there was no real way of knowing how much would be left or how long it would take. Could be months. Could be years. In addition, I would likely suffer confusion, memory problems, and other neurological symptoms, at least temporarily, but again he didn’t know how long that would last. But the important thing was, he said, he could probably shrink the tumor and it would probably stop growing. Lots of probablys. The treatment would require six weeks of daily radiation, and they would make a custom cage for my head so they could bolt it to the table during treatments. Good times.

Right after that visit, I met with the surgeon and neurologist, who told me that Fernando had grown another 3mm in six months, which was faster than expected. It was now roughly the size and shape of a stack of six quarters (it was the size of a kidney bean when it was first measured four years earlier). Not yet considered large but definitely growing toward my olfactory and optical nerves. They said I still had time to think about it and they scheduled me for another six-month follow-up. I realized they were putting the surgery off as long as they could since I’d be losing my olfaction either way.

By the time I got home, I was reeling. I couldn’t believe this was the best they could do. Then, after about a week of serious moping around, a lightbulb went off. I needed another opinion. But I’d tapped out of all the options at Vanderbilt, and it was the highest rated neurosurgery facility in Middle Tennessee, not to mention in my network. Back to the Google…