Jeannie Gaffigan with Joshua B. Bederson, MD, Professor and Chair of Neurosurgery, Mount Sinai Health System, the surgeon she credits with saving her life. Click here to watch Jeannie Gaffigan and Dr. Bederson on CBS Sunday Morning
From the moment her doctor told her a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan had revealed a large mass in her brain, Jeannie Gaffigan found her life filled with fear and anxiety—until she and her husband walked into The Mount Sinai Hospital and the office of Joshua B. Bederson, MD, Professor and Chair of Neurosurgery, Mount Sinai Health System.
Dr. Bederson and his staff quickly confirmed that she had a massive, life-threatening, benign pear-shaped tumor at the base of her skull that was severely compressing her brainstem. Just as important, they offered her a plan and a team of top-notch doctors and staff to whom she would entrust her life.
“We had hit the jackpot,” she writes of the team at Mount Sinai in her new book “When Life Gives You Pears,” in which she recounts her journey from sickness to health and the role that humor, faith, and family—plus her extended medical team—played in her recovery.
Watch: Jeannie and Jim Gaffigan tell their story on CBS Sunday Morning
Days after that first visit, Dr. Bederson removed the tumor during a 10-hour operation, one in which Dr. Bederson and his team relied on years of experience, combined with innovative augmented reality technology to systematically separate each of the nerves and myriad blood vessels from the tumor. By working above and below these nerves within the tumor and along the brainstem, eventually a complete removal of the tumor was accomplished.
Now, two years later, Jeannie Gaffigan, 49, a director, producer, and comedy writer and the wife of comedian Jim Gaffigan, is back to normal and savoring the simple pleasures of her life as a mother of five young children, still very grateful for the exceptional care she received from Dr. Bederson and many others at Mount Sinai.
“Every single person who has touched my life here has been an angel, and I just am so thankful for this institution,” she said during an emotional speech last year at a Mount Sinai fund-raising event. “Every single person who I’ve been treated by has been like the best and the top of their profession. I thank you, my husband thanks you, my five children thank you.”
In fact, she begins the acknowledgements at the end of her book by thanking by name a dozen Mount Sinai doctors, specialists, and staff members who cared for her in the weeks after surgery.
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Her story also contains an important lesson: For at least a year, she had ignored a number of seemingly harmless symptoms, including headaches, dizzy spells, and loss of hearing in one ear. Otherwise, doctors might have found the tumor at an earlier stage, before it grew to about six centimeters, which could have reduced some of the complications and side effects from the surgery.
She had dismissed her symptoms as the result of her hectic life, mixing a career in entertainment with caring for young children. “I just compartmentalized all my symptoms because I was so busy,” she said in an interview as part of Mount Sinai’s Road to Resilience podcast. “So I just made them all their own separate things. So separately they seemed like little, mild annoyances.”
She might have continued to ignore her symptoms if not for the Gaffigan family’s physician, according to the book. During a routine checkup for her kids, Jeannie Gaffigan couldn’t hear something the doctor said. The doctor asked how long she had had trouble hearing. All Jeannie Gaffigan could say was that it had been a while. The doctor urged her to go a specialist. An ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialist confirmed she was deaf in her left ear. Not seeing anything wrong with her ear during an examination, the doctor ordered an MRI on the chance there might be some obstruction deep inside the ear. The MRI showed a large mass in her brain.
At that point, she needed to see a neurosurgeon quickly. A dear cousin urged her to go to Mount Sinai. After a call from her ENT doctor, she had an appointment with Dr. Bederson, who was able to see her immediately, joined by his senior physician assistant Leslie Schlachter, PA-C, Clinical Director of Neurosurgery at The Mount Sinai Hospital. Looking at her MRI scan, Dr. Bederson said the tumor had probably been growing for years and was pushing against her brainstem, leading to a range of symptoms she had been feeling. Immediate brain surgery was needed to remove the tumor.
“I have just one question: Am I going to die?” she asked Dr. Bederson. Dr. Bederson said no. His response “was all that I needed. I knew everything else was going to be okay,” she writes in her book. (After the surgery, Dr. Bederson would diagnose the tumor as a choroid plexus papilloma, a rare type of slow-growing, non-cancerous (benign) tumor.)
A family photo of the Gaffigans
The surgery marked the beginning of a lengthy recovery, with her husband leading her caregiver team. Immediately afterwards, she spent about two weeks in the intensive care unit at The Mount Sinai Hospital, and then several more weeks in the hospital. She could not eat or drink because the surgery had left her unable to swallow. She left the hospital with a feeding tube, which was removed months later. Thanks to speech and swallow therapy, she has regained the ability to talk and eat.
Despite her personal ordeal, Jeannie Gaffigan is expecting something good to come out of her experience.
She had not intended to write a book; it began as notes she kept for herself. She hopes it may help others. “It’s not a textbook, but it’s something I wish that I had read going into this,” she told Mount Sinai’s podcast team.
And she and her husband have launched a campaign to help Dr. Bederson and Mount Sinai’s Department of Neurosurgery purchase the latest equipment for his operating room. Their fundraising goal: $500,000.