Brain cancer would kill me. Instead, it gave me a new lease on life.

When I came out of the anesthesia, I saw my children next to my bed. It was the first time we had all been together in years. In that moment I knew, perhaps for the first time, how much I was loved. If a fatal brain tumor was the price I had to pay, I considered it a bargain.

Of course, the old wounds were hardly healed, and there were any number of ways this meeting could have gone south. And yet something profound had happened. The presence of my family told me that we were in this together. I hoped that we would continue to persevere in the difficult months and years to come.

The biggest challenge was the work I had to do on myself. The treatment – ​​chemotherapy, radiation and steroids – initially brought out the worst in me. Keppra, an anti-seizure drug, is known to induce aggressive anger. Leila was the recipient of that.

Before I was discharged from the hospital, we sought advice from a neuropsychologist, who helped us adapt to the emotional lability that a brain tumor can cause. Together we would overcome this, we decided, and we did. With the help of Meigs Ross, a gifted relationship therapist with experience working with brain injuries, we found ways to adapt. “There are three of you in this relationship now,” she told us, “Rod, Leila and GBM”

One night, Leila came out of the bedroom after hearing a crash. I had been drinking a bottle of wine and dropped it from my left hand, which had been paralyzed since my operation. When I was a journalist, alcohol was practically a tool of trade. But now it was getting riskier. Around the anniversary of my diagnosis, I sought treatment for alcohol abuse, and with the help of a counselor, I spoke about my father’s cruelty for the first time. Over the course of the year we worked together, I began to understand why I had been using alcohol to numb myself. By the end, I realized that I was finally free from the shame my father had left me.