Mom of Teen Blames Forgetfulness on Menopause. Then She Saw the Scans: 'All I Could Think About Was Not Being There for Her'
A single mom is living with a shocking diagnosis.
April Tate was working in childcare in Fife, a coastal community in Scotland, in 2018 when she forgot the name of one of the children in her care. April, who was 52 at the time, chalked the lapse up to hormones; as Harvard Health explains, forgetfulness and brain fog are commonly reported symptoms of menopause. But when she mentioned the memory lapse to her doctor, he asked her to come in for an evaluation immediately, according to Daily Mail.
That's when doctors scanned her brain — and April was given the devastating news: She had a brain tumor. And while it wasn't cancerous, it was so deep in her brain that it couldn't be removed. As Mount Sinai explains, the type of tumor April has, a posterior falcine meningioma, is slow-growing, but in the part of the brain that focuses on movement, coordination, and "vital body functions such as breathing.'
'When they said I had a brain tumor, my first thought was that I was going to die. It was a numbing moment. I was a single mom, and my daughter Abby was still a teenager. All I could think about was not being there for her,' she told the outlet. 'When the surgeon explained the tumor was located in a really difficult part of my brain and he'd only attempted surgery in that area once before, it was hard to accept.'
April was self-employed, which 'brought financial pressure,' as she had to take time off work for treatment, losing income. It 'just added to the stress.'
She was told to 'watch and wait,' she says, with regular scans monitoring the tumor's growth. 'For a while, it didn't change much,' she explains. Still, 'it was terrifying to live with the unknown of whether it would grow or not. Over time, I began to adjust.'
In late 2022, April was given the bleak news that the tumor had begun to grow, qualifying her for daily radiation. While she says the treatment itself 'was fairly quick each day … it was exhausting.'
She had to wear a custom mask to keep her head completely still, a process that she said felt 'claustrophobic and intense … I just closed my eyes, listened to music and tried to stay calm. The hardest part came afterwards, with having to wait to find out if it had worked.'
It did, she shared — and while she still has to undergo scans, she's been able to go back to work and increase her physical activity. She ran a 5K this year, and she's taking part in a fundraising challenge via JustGiving to pay for a single day of research at a Scottish brain tumor center. As she explained, 'What shocks me most is how little funding goes into researching brain tumors. That has to change.'
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And while she is grateful her tumor isn't cancerous, April explains, 'There's something in my brain that shouldn't be there, and it could change at any time. I even worried about how it might affect new relationships and not wanting to burden someone else with what I was going through. But we still deserve to live fully, and to love and be loved.'
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