Glioblastoma

Sounds like something fun, doesn’t it? Havin’ a “blast”?

It’s a different kind of “blast.” It’s more like an explosion, like TNT or an atomic bomb, instead of a party.

Tarot symbolism uses the Tower to represent this sort of thing. The thing that comes hurtling into your life from a clear blue sky, a thunderbolt of change that just leaves you gobsmacked. The Tower is discovering that you’re pregnant at the age of 46, just weeks away from your youngest child’s high school graduation. Then finding out it’s twins. The Tower is falling in love when you least expect it and don’t particularly want it. The Tower is losing your job the same week you close on a new house and your kid goes off to college. The Tower is when your house burns down and there’s nothing left but starting over.

Or a brain tumor. The Tower is a brain tumor that grew there silently, maybe over years of time, and you never knew it was there until you started having headaches and dizziness and blurred vision. And then, after you discover the brain tumor is there, you can’t ever go back to being that person who has headaches sometimes but never heard of the word “glioblastoma.”

The Tower is when this happens to your son and you are helpless and all you can do is watch him suffer.

The good news is…primary brain cancer does not typically metastacize. It doesn’t usually spread itself in generous helpings all throughout the body like other forms of cancer.

The bad news is…one year life expectancy for glioblastoma is only 29%. Ten year life expectancy is 2.3%.

The Tower is not a merciful card. For me, it is a sober reminder of what really matters, for do we ever think about how much something matters until it occurs to us we might lose it?