It's not a tumor

Unfortunately, it was. Today I had to tell two patients and their families that they had brain tumors. It is so uncommon to even have one patient with a brain tumor that two kind of overwhelmed me. Both patients were stoic, but their spouses started to cry. It's not necessarily a death sentence, but there is just no good way to tell someone that he/she has cancer in the brain. One patient presented with 2 weeks of worsening memory loss and difficulty word-finding. The other had a change in her mental status. We thought she was on drugs. She wasn't. She had two tumors in her head that were pushing against the other side of her brain. It had been going on for a few weeks and her family doctor told her she had a "complicated migraine". I don't have the benefit of knowing these people. This is the first time I'm meeting them and I have to give them life-changing news. I used to cry with them, but have developed some coping skills in order to keep my sanity. But coping skills aren't enough for these two patients.