In looking back before the diagnosis and surgery to remove my tumor, I see things that were symptoms that something was wrong, but I didn’t recognize it then. I’m going to create some posts as I remember them.

This is the first one I’m posting.

6 months before diagnosis, my family and I went skiing. I was never very good, even as a child, but the kids wanted to go. I signed up for lessons, and just did okay, but I fell a lot. I was determined to do more than the “bunny slope”. I could turn left, but when I turned right I fell over. My right leg just wasn’t supporting my well, but it didn’t feel weak, I just fell. Never got off the bunny slope, ended up fighting with my wife, not a good day.

Brain tumor on the left side, issues on the right side of the body.

That was definitely a symptom.

I was working late (as always), and left work at about 6:00. Driving home, I got a headache (which was also very common, but I always associated it with working late at a high-stress job. But on June 4, something was different. I was on the highway, and it wasn’t dark yet, but I saw some strange gold-colored lights in my vision off to my right side. They looked like a crescent shape of bright gold sparkles. I knew they were not something real, but didn’t know what to make of it, so I kept driving home (right past the interstate exit to a hospital).

So I get home, grabbed 4 ibuprofin (a nurse told me that was okay, but I’ll comment on that later), and just rested a moment on the sofa. The headache went away, no more lights, problem solved.

My wife gets home, and although I don’t usually mention physical problems to her, I told her, “you know I had the strangest thing happen on the way home, I saw these strange gold colored lights off to the right side of my vision on the way driving home!” She said “Oh really? Why don’t you come with me to take our son to a practice?” So we head off, drop off our son, and she tells me she’s headed to the ER at the closest hospital(!)

Here’s where things start getting weird. She asked me how my head felt. I told her “I don’t have a head bang anymore.” A what? Yup, that’s what I said, and it made perfect sense to me. I insisted that I was fine and didn’t need to go to the hospital. She called the doctor’s office, got someone on the phone, then passed the phone to me and told me to tell them why I didn’t need to go. The confusion in my head at this point was making words switch around, and I really have no idea what I said, or they said. But my wife pulls the car over and asks if I’m ready to go now. And we did. And the drama started – I’ll talk more about those parts later.

So the question is, how did my wife know to take me to the ER???

This is how God works. You don’t have to believe my perspective on this, but my faith is so much greater after looking at how the elements all came together, and I didn’t die (or worse) from that brain tumor in 2008. My wife was in a Psychodiagnostics class, and the instructor, not as part of the class, but as an aside to the students, told them if anyone ever tells you they see lights in their vision, take them to the ER immediately. This is one of my many God-incidents along my way to now, and I’ll share more later.

And she did.

I believe there are many reasons for seeing lights in your vision, especially while driving. But if they are not real physical lights, then most of the reasons could be deadly. So if you are reading this post, take this little piece of information with you, and use it when necessary:

If anyone ever tells you they see lights in their vision, take them to the ER immediately.