I HAD BEEN suffering a loss of balance for a few weeks and my doctor had given me pills for vertigo that hadn't worked. So he sent me for an MRI of my head, just in case.
It was Valentine's Day, 1992. I remember because my pager went off while I was buying chocolates for my wife. The doctor's assistant said on the phone that the MRI results were in and the doctor wanted to see me, right away. The assistant was under orders not to tell me anything else. But I knew it was bad.
I immediately started to think about myself the past tense. The way a lot of reporting is already talking about Senator Edward M. Kennedy, recapping his life in a sort of pre-obituary. It's like many things with the news media. They tell us that it's a malignant world out there. Things are bad. Things are scary. Things are falling apart. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't.
That afternoon I spent two tearful hours with my wife waiting for the doctor's appointment, during which we talked about how to tell the kids, even where I wanted to be buried. The end of my life was at hand, at 41, with kids 10 and 7 and a happy marriage. Death. Finished. Goodbye.
I called work and told them. Colleagues started calling with all sorts of love and good wishes. But they were goodbye calls. I can imagine how the calls to the senator sound. Lots of love. Lots of support. But this underlying feeling that some of the callers want to get in that last conversation while they can.
The night before my surgery, alone with the staggering possibility that tomorrow was my last day alive, could have been terrifying. But it turned out to be the most peaceful night of my life, because somehow I filled up with hope. I was just bathed in this general feeling that whatever happened, however it turned out, I'd be OK. I don't know where it came from but it was hope, not fear.
While I was in surgery my wife, not a religious person at the time, went to the hospital's nondenominational chapel, which was perhaps visited by friends and family of the senator while he was there. As soon as she walked into the chapel she was just filled with calm and peace that whatever lay ahead, everything would somehow be all right. She didn't know where it came from but it was hope, not fear. When she went back to my room, friends and family told her the doctor had called, while she was in the chapel, to say I'd be fine.
My tumor was benign, and removable without damaging the brain. I was lucky. I walked away healthy. I was also blessed with the gift of perspective about a lot of things. One was about myself as a journalist. I realized how my negative, overly dramatic, jump-to-the-worst-conclusion reporting had been helping create those ominous views about life people have -that things are scary, that everything is falling apart - that most people with brain tumors die.
It's important for the thousands of people who will hear those dreaded words, "You have a brain tumor," to know that even people with the malignant variety the senator has often survive for several years. It's important for all of us to remember that even a scary world has hope. I hope the senator makes it, and has a good long laugh at all his political opponents who normally love to stab him in the back, and the media who usually love to dump on him, who are talking about him lovingly now, assuming these are his last days.
David Ropeik is a consultant in risk management and a former reporter at WCVB-TV.
