Note: When I first met Jodi Brown at her sister Tamra’s house, I couldn’t help but cry with her when she told me her story. Her life changing struggle with her health was heartbreaking, but I was so blown away by her quiet strength. I wrote this interview about a year ago, and since then, Jodi has had tremendous success with her recovery. She recently started a new blog, Life Under Construction, as a way to share her positive message about hope and inspiration to help others get through the hard times.
When I transferred my interviews over from blogger, the comments didn’t save. Please feel free to leave any new comments at the end of each post. I still love hearing your thoughts!
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{Interview with Jodi Brown originally published on November 4, 2009 on The Veeda Weekly.}
- {Jodi Brown (pictured right) and her mother. All photos courtesy of Jodi Brown.}
I had the chance to talk with Jodi Brown, an amazing mother of four who was diagnosed with a brain tumor back in April. While some mothers spent their summer months camping or vacationing with their family, Jodi has been fighting for her life.
“About a year ago I started having weird symptoms,” explains Jodi. “They might not have seemed weird to other people, but for me they were strange. I started having severe headaches, and I’ve never had headaches my whole life.” Along with the unexplained head pain, Jodi also experienced mysterious vertigo. “Horrible dizzy spells where I couldn’t walk down the hall and the room was spinning,” she described.
Trips to the doctor diagnosed her with an inner ear infection. After months of treatment, Jodi wasn’t getting better—she was getting worse. With no relief from pain, Jodi felt frustrated. “My husband and I just said to each other, ‘Something is really wrong . . . and we have to figure out what it is,’” she said.
More visits to the doctor ensued. After additional testing and blood work provided no explanation, the Browns finally decided to schedule a Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI. What Jodie thought would be just another routine test in her ruling-out-process turned out to be a pivotal point in her life. “Before I could even walk out of the [exam] room they asked me to stop,” Jodi remembers. “They said, ‘There’s a radiologist in other room and he thinks he sees something. Would you be willing to go back into the MRI and do it again?’”
As Jodi prepared to take another exam, she said she wasn’t nervous. “I remember laying there in the MRI machine thinking to myself, ‘Of course there is something there,’” she recalls. “I wasn’t afraid at all. I was actually relieved because I thought, ‘I knew that something had to be wrong and now I know what it is, and now I can fix it.’ I wish it had all been that easy.”
The next day, Jodi learned that she had an inoperable brain tumor. In between her ear canal and brain stem was a tumor that had taken over that tiny half-inch space. The growth had flattened all the nerves and now had no more room to grow. “It was between a rock and a hard place,” Jodi said.
This was the beginning of a long list of miracles, Jodi said. She found a surgeon in Salt Lake City who said he could perform the operation. “He said, ‘There is nothing that is inoperable, but there are severe consequences,’” she explained. “You can operate on anything, you just may not come out of it. He took at look at the scans and said, ‘I think we can do this.’”
Three major brain surgeries later, Jodi is recovering. Her road to recovery has not been an easy one. A five-day hospital stay turned in thirty-four death-defying days. While the removal of the tumor—later found to be benign—was a success, Jodi will never be the same. She had two spinal fluid leaks in the hospital. Pneumocephalus, or air on the brain, that almost took her life. From her very difficult surgery, she’s also had many side effects: partial facial paralysis, loss of sight and eye complications, and hearing loss.
Jodi after surgery.
With family after surgery.
Despite her weakened health, this brave mom says she is grateful for her challenges. “You would never chose to have an experience like this,” she said. “But now having gone through and seeing the out pouring of love, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t take it away.”
Through everything, the support from those around her is what kept Jodi going. “Even on my worst days, I have to keep positive for them,” she said. Family members who gave up nearly everything to help her and thoughtful strangers who sent kind notes truly touched her. “Family and neighbors, just adopted my kids for weeks at a time,” she said.
Jodi said the greatest sacrifice came from her mom, who gave up her own graduation ceremony at Brigham Young University Hawaii to be with her daughter. After putting off her education for 35 years to raise her family, Jodi’s mom was scheduled to walk next to her son in the graduation procession. “Instead, she spent her time next to me at the hospital,” Jodi said with tears.
Spending the afternoon talking to Jodi was truly enlightening and uplifting. Here are a few more questions I asked this inspirational mom.
Q: How did your blog (A Miracle for Jodi Brown) come about?
Wonderful things were happening all the time because my family created this blog for me. We had a lot of family phoning all the time and there was no way we could talk to people every single day. In the beginning, when I could, I was writing it. Then Tami [her sister] was writing it. When I got into the hospital, my dad and my husband took turns writing. My dad came to the hospital every single day and sat by my bed . . . he would give updates . . . every couple hours on what was happening. As soon as he posted a new update, people were praying, they were sending notes. They were sending comments, they were sending flowers; they were sending cards. It made a tremendous difference.
I was just lying there in pain all the time. As the comments came, my dad or my husband would read them to me. I knew several times throughout the day, there were people thinking of me. There were people praying for me. Even though I was in a lot of pain and things were not going right at the hospital, we still felt very, very blessed. We were surrounded by people who were showing extraordinary amounts of love for us.
Q: What was your experience going out in public for the first time?
[I went to] Walgreens to pick up a prescription and get tape to close my eye. We used to tape my eye shut before I had surgery . . . we tried everything in the world to keep my eye closed because my cornea was getting very damaged. I had on a big eye patch and my face was paralyzed. I wasn’t able to walk very well because I was too unsteady . . . I remember walking in, and this young guy sees me and turns away. [He] does this double take. He had this look his face like, ‘What in the world was wrong with her?’ The little kids in the store would come up and stare at me. You could see their parents shuffling them, away like, ‘Don’t say anything, don’t saying anything!’ I thought, ‘I don’t want to be one of those people who [others] are afraid to talk too.’
Q: Tell me about your bedazzled eye patch.
With mommy's inspirational eye patch.
[My friend Stacie] had the idea. She said, ‘Jodi. You are amazing. You are a survivor. Don’t be afraid when you go out in public . . . take pride in who you are. You need to take all your patches, and bedazzle them! Put jewels all over them so people know you are proud to be a survivor and proud to be alive.’ I loved her idea. The next day, we got out the glue gun and all diamond jewels things we could whip up at home . . . each of the kids and I sat there and bedazzled the patches. Now whenever I go out, I wear my bedazzled patches.
Q: How should people react when they encounter someone with a disability?
For me personally, I would rather have someone talk to me then to pretend that I’m not there. Also, I think it helps kids know that people with disabilities — they are people too. When they talk to you, they can see that. I certainly didn’t go into this thinking I would come out with physically handicaps, but I did. There’s nothing I can do about it now, you just have to deal it with it the best you can.
Q: What difference does attitude make?
Having a positive attitude and being able to see the good — even when the situation seems dire — I think . . . is the most important thing. It was very easy for me to have a good attitude because I felt completely surrounded [by] love . . . I was shown more love through this experience than I’ve ever have in my [whole] life. That itself, made the whole thing worth it. Even on my worst days, I feel like I have to keep fighting for them — they keep me going.
Friends and family welcome Jodi home.
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Nov. 5, 2009 update: Jodi would like to thank the people who meant the most to her during this difficult time: her parents and husband. In an e-mail, she said:
Mom ended up staying in Utah for 3 months. During that time, she lived with my family and took care of my kids while I was in the hospital. She came to visit me on the weekends, while my hubby, Tolan, was in charge at home. Equally impressive was my Dad, who took off a month from his job as a CEO to sit by me, day after day in the hospital. It was their combined effort, along with my husband, who juggled both work and family the whole time, to keep us all going. These are the small details, but they are the people who truly did do the most, so I would love to give them the credit they “deserve” in this whole thing. :)
- Jodi, with husband Tolan (on left), and her parents, Sherri and Von Orgill.
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*Do you find Jodi inspiring? Please leave her a comment and let us know your kind thoughts!
