The power of Rediscovering Life After a Brain Tumor
[Music]
what are the odds
that suddenly you wake up and you cannot
read
write or add two plus two what are the
odds that after a short two-hour surgery
you don’t even remember what year you
were born
my name is natalie jacob and i am the
author of the book eight
rediscovering life after brain tumor and
this
is the closest thing i found in my house
to a tedx red rock i hope you guys like
it it’s a speaker actually
so i was born in bogota colombia
to a very international family my father
is french and all that side of my family
is french and my mom
is american and all that side of my
family is american
so because i was born in such an
international household i’ve always
actually wanted to build an
international life for myself
so as soon as i see as i hit 16 i left
my house and i went to live to paris
and i did my um my my
high school over there and after that i
come back to colombia where i studied
business
and i realized that the best shot i
would have to have an international
lifestyle
was working for multinationals or
fortune 500 companies
so i dedicated my life to my passion
which i discovered that was
marketing and i worked around several
countries and several cities so i worked
i
worked in i worked in madrid i worked in
puerto rico i worked in miami
um i’m actually now living in westport
in connecticut in the usa
but i dedicated my life to working for
companies like frito-lay nokia l’oreal
johnson and johnson and diego
are some of the ones i did um and
as you can see everything that i talk
about my life in the past
was basically work my passion in life
was to work my family and sailing i’ve
been actually on a sailboat since i’m
four years old and i’ve i’ve won several
national championships but that was what
made me
me and what made me happy in the past
and then one day in the year 2015 i went
skiing with some more colleagues to
canada to in whistler
and it was the first day of skiing it
was full of energy for the ones that ski
you know my muscles weren’t hurting i
was
you know hyped up and i was going down
the slopes
and i fall really really hard um to the
point that i break my goggles and my
finger went completely black
so i it was my first day of vacations
and i didn’t really want to ruin my trip
so i just went down the slope bought a
popsicle a popsicle
and i just taped the popsicle stick to
my fingers
and continued my my week of ski when i
went back to miami which is the place
where at the moment i was living
i did take an appointment with a with a
doctor just to check my finger
actually and i told him about the fall
and he decided to take
uh a cd scan of like my brain as well
just in case
and so he said you have something called
the coincidental finding which is just
by coincidence
nothing happened with the ski fall but
you do need to take an appointment with
a neurosurgeon so i took an appointment
with a surgeon and i went with my
husband at that time
and he actually had a computer screen
with a picture of the mri of my brain
which was exactly what i have up here in
screen right now
and he said you have an intraventricular
meninge the size
of a line but i mean intraventricular
meaning doma i have
what does what does that even mean like
i i really didn’t get worried at all
because i didn’t know what those words
meant whatsoever and he did say you do
have a two percent
chance of losing your peripheral
eyesight but other than that
there’s no other risks and the recovery
week is three weeks
um the recovery period is three weeks
and i honestly thought
oh my gosh i worked so much all my life
i’m gonna get three weeks to watch
netflix awesome so i was really not
worried at all whatsoever
to the point that the night before the
surgery um
with my husband we were even making
jokes so they put you this little things
like on your head to know where they’re
going to go in for the incision for the
brain surgery
um and my husband was looking up his
home like oh my god he reminds me so
much of some
of the night from the 80s and he googles
an image and voila that’s what he
that’s what he showed me so we were
really honestly just having a blast
and and not really understanding the
gravity of the situation
so i go into surgery and it was indeed a
very short surgery of only two hours
and after that i wake up and i cannot
read
and i cannot write and i cannot add two
plus two
and they give me a pencil and a paper
and they asked me to write my name and i
still knew that my name was natalie
jacob
and i dry circle and i find this
hilarious i cannot stop laughing i mean
here i am at that moment i was 35 years
old a 35 year old woman with an mba from
iu business school
and working for you know with a
successful career working for
multinationals
and i don’t even know how to write my
name
and so they make me walk the quarters of
the hospital because you you know the
brain doesn’t only manage you know your
this your smartness but it manages the
whole body
so i so they made me walk the whole the
quarters of the hospital and they asked
me so what number do you see in that
drum like
eight and so they want make me walk to
the next one and they ask me what number
do you think that girl i’m like
eight i saw everything as an eighth and
that’s why the title of the book gets
called
eight rediscovering life after a brain
tumor
so after two weeks in the hospital i
honestly
was having a blast i my family was
shocked
the doctor was shocked but i
i found everything funny and fun because
i knew this wasn’t gonna be like
forever i thought it was gonna be
temporary so i was really not stressed
at all
and something quite spectacular happened
my brain became
so simple that i had the brain of a
tour of three-year-old and
the simplicity of life was just
gorgeous to enjoy like after those two
weeks in the hospital i went back home
and my by coincidence my office was
actually
a block away from my house so all my
work colleagues would come and visit me
and i couldn’t even have a conversation
with them because having a conversation
was too advanced for what my brain was
at the moment they couldn’t just follow
so the only thing i would enjoy was
coloring so i would color
coloring books and i would have all my
adult friends come and visit me
and you know try to talk to me and i
will be like hi
and i would go back to coloring and it
was beautiful and my husband would take
me
on walks outside near the you know
around the neighborhood and
obviously i would have to walk with him
um because i couldn’t i woke up
partially blind
so i couldn’t you know i would like i
wouldn’t know how to walk would fall
down
you know a stair i would hit myself like
in stores i mean it was a mess
um but then i would walk the streets and
i would hear a bird chirp and i was like
birdie birdie i mean a 35 year old
enjoying the beauty of nature
was honestly just purely spectacular
so it was a really happy moment in my
life but life is life isn’t all
roses honestly unfortunately and after
some time
i started to become a little bit less
dumb or a little bit more smart
and i quite and i started to realize
actually
the severity of what i was actually
living and so three months afterwards i
lost my job
and that was basically the first hit i
had i
lost my job due to a brain tumor like
like who who would even think that would
be a possibility in someone’s life
um and it was really hard because on top
of that actually when that i was
when i was working at diago i was
actually my husband’s boss
or dotted line manager and so what that
implied was that we lost 60
of our household income so that was
really difficult for
for for our family but on top of that
the toughest part of this is that i
actually lost
my iq so when i explained to you guys at
the beginning that what made me me
was you know being a nerd and being a
workaholic and being smart
that loss of iq was
losing myself completely and when i mean
that i lost my acute i’m not just
you know saying it for saying it i
actually have the numbers by coincidence
six months before my surgery
i had an iq test because i was in an
interview process for some miller
and they flew me from miami to chicago
to do a whole day iq test and i did it
and i have the results and i was above
average um
and after my surgery medical for medical
reasons they actually give you iq
tests paid by the medical insurance so i
had one six months after my surgery one
one year
two years three years and i actually had
one not long ago again
and my iq stagnated at
below below average like below below
average so i literally passed from being
an above iq person to a below below
average
and that was
so hard for me because i was
i was never it was never about i don’t
know my looks
it was always only about
my smartness or my capability to
maintain myself my capability to have a
successful career
my capability to live around the world
and i lost all that and that wasn’t easy
and on top of that remember the two
percent probability chance of losing my
porridge my my peripheral eyesight i
nailed it i won the lottery and i am
partially blind now and i’ll be
partially bent for the rest of my life
so
just to explain to you guys what it is i
basically if i if you if i would have
you
in front of in front of me i would only
see half of your face
so when i look at a computer screen i
only see half of the computer screen
i don’t see anything from here to here
with my both eyes
um it took me some years to get used to
it um at the beginning if
it was a complete mess i would fall i
couldn’t use a knife because i for the
risk of cutting a finger
but nowadays honestly i learned how to
manage it but the
biggest disability that i have is that i
suffer something called brain fatigue
and it’s very difficult to explain to
you guys what that is but it’s
you know after a whole day’s work or
after you know
a whole day of classes at ie you get
home at six or seven pm and you’re just
tired imagine that tiredness kicking in
at any moment at any day for whatever
reason it could be at 10 a.m it could be
at 11 a.m
and it’s just because my brain because
he was injured after that brain surgery
that i had
it’s basically a brain that doesn’t that
take a lot of effort to just
work at a decent rate so it’s just
all the time overworking and overworking
and do do that i just get really brain
fatigued so
it’s basically for that reason that i am
officially disabled um
here in the usa and i can’t maintain a
full-time job
eight hours per day five days per week
and that was honestly really really
difficult
but after doing a lot of cognitive
therapy because i had to learn how to
read and write again right
um i i started i started to
write what i was going through in life
and i just opened my computer and i just
because the muscle memory actually of
like typing in a keyboard was still
there
i just started to write and by writing i
was forced
to read and by reading i was actually
forced to remember because i also
suffered a short-term memory
so i decided to start to do this and in
the process
i discovered that i was pregnant and i
was gonna be a mom
and then i realized my daughter
is actually never gonna know who i was
before my surgery because i mean i don’t
even know who i’m gonna be in the future
because the the natalie that was there
before is clearly no longer here and
will never be here anymore
so i decided to change those writings
into a book
and i published the book for my daughter
for her to basically know who
mommy was before her brain surgery and
it’s been honestly really spectacular
because i
i definitely decided that i did not want
to make any money from a book
because of brain brain tumors so i
donate a hundred percent of the
of the profits to bring to my
foundations and
even after going through all this um
journey
and being a mom which made me absolutely
you know ecstatic and
and and honestly mother nature’s
spectacular when you become a mother
i can’t even understand why it’s so
strong the maternal feeling you get
but even with that i was very sad
because i felt purposeless
i mean who was i if if i couldn’t do
all the passions and make me happy you
know i couldn’t sail
i couldn’t work i couldn’t travel
anymore i mean i
it you you feel you feel purposeless and
it’s not where do you find a new purpose
you can’t just go out and buy purpose in
a supermarket
and i didn’t even know how to even start
that journey
to find a new purpose so i literally
honestly without knowing i just started
to volunteer
um here in connecticut where i live in
the connecticut brain tumor
association the connecticut green tumor
alliance and in its foundation
to read for children in need and through
doing that i discovered that my passion
was actually helping others
and even nowadays even for the i don’t
know some magic
trick in the world my iq and my brain
would come back to me
i don’t want to go back to that life i
just want to dedicate my life to helping
others
so how do i translate that into my life
nowadays i
knowing that i don’t have that much
energy i decided to create
community um and i created three
facebook groups which between them they
have over a thousand
five like to over two thousand people
actually the first one is called tumor
cellularity which is a group for brain
tumor survivors
in spain and latin america another one
is called what’s for stay at home moms
and it’s this is my actually
my favorite group above all because we
it’s a group where we we’re moms get to
get together we make friends the
husbands make friends among them and the
kids make friends
and we’re now a huge community of over
500 moms that get together
all the time and it’s pretty spectacular
i mean not with cobra 19 no we can’t but
we will back
soon when we can and the last group is a
it’s a group called westport women
and it’s a group that i created for
women that have businesses run from
their homes
for them to be able to um do promotion
for free
um online with their targeted market and
never in my wildest dreams honestly did
i ever expect
that my book would receive so much
attention from media it’s just
it’s been it’s honestly just been
magical i i would have never imagined i
mean i didn’t even know how to read and
write
and now i wrote a book and it’s all over
the news it’s just
it’s it’s magical i never expected it
so i just wanted to um end by sharing
with you guys a quote that is actually
from my book
um and i read a bit slow so bear with me
but i’ll try to read as quick as
my eyes permit me reinvent yourself
having the mental flexibility to
reinvent yourself your goals and what
brings you joy and meaning in life
will be the strength you need to
continue building your life path without
breaking you when things get in the way
don’t just hope for a better moment
create it work for it
and make it happen life doesn’t happen
to you
you make it happen and that’s all
thank you so much