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In addition to the deficits, her personality changed to being moody, bad-tempered and intolerant but given all she went through, how much of that was a product of the tumours altering her brain and how much the treatment and how much the stress and pressure of living through a second bout of cancer (she had previously had breast cancer and her first husband had died of the same type of cancer, melanoma, she had)?
As the inflammation goes down and the tumors shrink away, she begins to remember all the strange things she went to while her brain was swollen and being pushed on by tumors. She realizes she has lived through a situation very like schizophrenia, proving that mental illness can be created by physical stresses on the brain.Lipska notes that, "Deep inside my brain, a full-scale war had erupted. The tumors that had been radiated were shedding dead cells and creating waste and dead tissue. Throughout my brain, the tissues were inflamed and swollen from the metastasis and the double assault of radiation and immunotherapy. What’s more, I had new tumors—more than a dozen. My blood-brain barrier…..had become disrupted.....and was leaking fluid. The fluids were pooling in my brain, irritating the tissue and causing it to swell."
This is one strong lady used to being in charge and when her brain started acting off, her family really didn't know how to react, and she didn't realize it's happening, so it's a real mess for a while because no one wants to take the reins from her or tell her she's not in charge anymore.
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Lipska is very fortunate to have a husband, Mirek, who's a cool-headed mathematician; a son, Witek, who's a neuroscientist; a daughter, Kasia, who's a physician; and a sister, Maria, who's a physicist and chief of therapy in the radiation oncology department at Boston's 'Brigham and Women's Hospital.' Very rarely do I get upset at anything I read. I did for some judgments made on this book by other reviewers. I wish I had not read them at all. Somehow I want to believe that people can be non-judgmental, tolerant. And see more than a class or an identity or ethnicity or a skin color. I am a neuroscientist. For my entire career, I have studied mental illness. My specialty is schizophrenia. In June 2015, without warning, my own mind took a strange and frightening turn. As a result of metastatic melanoma in my brain, I began a descent into mental illness that lasted about two months."—Barbara K. Lipska Within months after her surgery, Lipska felt good enough to go skiing with her family and to resume her regular triathlon training, which includes swimming, cycling, and running.
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