Brain tumor survivor lives life to the fullest

“I was driving home from work when half my face went numb. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it might be a stroke. I called my dad and told him, ‘I think something’s wrong.’ He pretty much told me to walk it off. Then I called my wife, and she was like, ‘You need to go to the emergency room right now.’ When I got there, they ruled out a stroke. They did an MRI, and they found a brain tumor. It was pretty huge. They said it had probably been there since I was a teenager. It had been slowly growing, and now it was on the rise to kill me. They told me I had like a year to live unless we did surgery to cut it out. That was a pretty easy decision.

“I was in critical care for about a week before I went home. Then I had about six months of recovery time. I’m just recently getting out and doing stuff again. I’m feeling pretty good overall. But half my face is numbed up because the muscle on that side doesn’t work as well, and I’m deaf in that ear. All the steroids they gave me caused AVN (avascular necrosis) in one of my legs, where basically the blood stopped flowing and it started collapsing the bone. They did a procedure to fix it for now. But they said by 50, I’ll need a hip replacement. 

“I have to get an MRI every six months to make sure the tumor doesn’t come back. They also told me that I probably won’t have as long of a life as before. We’re looking at maybe 70 years. It’s weird to have a time limit on how long you have to live. But I’m here now, and I just try to focus on things in my daily life. It’s important for my daughter to see me well adjusted and carrying on with life. We have a rule in our house that if you can fix something, you fix it. So it’s up to me to fix my own attitude about everything and just move forward. I’m not going to let what’s happened slow me down. I know I’ve got to make the best of things before 70.”

— Kyle Perry