Mom Diagnosed With Brain Cancer at 37 Thought Early Signs Were The Flu

This past February, Molly Young’s twin daughters were home sick with the flu. When she started to feel ill herself, she wondered if she had caught it.

“I got up from my desk, I felt super dizzy, felt super nauseous,” Young, 38, from Apple Valley, Minnesota, tells TODAY.com. “Then I felt so sick that I felt like I had to lay down.” A neighbor who is a nurse encouraged Young to visit the emergency room and she soon learned why she felt so sick. She had a brain tumor that had caused a partial seizure, which led to her symptoms.

“No one thinks, ‘Oh maybe I’m walking around with a brain tumor when you’re having no other signs,’” she says. “That’s part of what makes it a surprise to get the diagnosis.”

Flu-like symptoms lead to unexpected diagnosis

At the end of February, Young’s twin daughters had the flu, so she was working from home in the morning. When her husband arrived for the afternoon shift, he asked for assistance in putting the girls down. As soon as Young stood, she felt ill.

“I went to the bathroom to lay down on the bathroom floor by the toilet in case I got nauseous and puked,” she says. “He came in and checked on me once he got the girls down, and I was like, ‘I don’t know, something doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel good.’”

Young wondered what could be wrong but figured that if her daughters had the flu, she likely did, too. When the wave of nausea passed, she moved to her bed but still felt unwell. Her husband asked a neighbor who is a nurse to look at Young.

“I explained to her what was going on, and she’s like, ‘That’s unusual. I’d go to the emergency department if I was you,’” she says. “She’s like, ‘Your lungs sound good. You don’t have a lot of congestion. I don’t think this is flu.’”

Young visited the emergency department and staff began neurological assessments. A few months prior, Young’s father was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, which had spread to his brain. Young knew she was undergoing the same tests as he did.

“I realized pretty quickly how serious it was because of the neurological assessments,” Young says.

Doctors ordered an MRI, which explained what happened to Young.

“Doctors said, ‘We think what you experienced earlier was a focal seizure,’” she says. “You have a mass in your brain. It’s 4 centimeters by 4 centimeters, and we’re going to refer you to neurosurgery.”

Young felt stunned. Her family had recently grappled with her dad’s cancer, and now she a different type of cancer in her brain.

“It felt like you’re getting hit back to back with these large medical events,” she says. “But it’s also reassuring to see (that) my dad had a craniotomy, where he had brain cancer removed. … You at least have awareness that the surgery can go well.” 

While her father underwent successful treatment for his melanoma, Young needed to decide on her own treatment. She met with two neurosurgeons, and “both of them pretty much said the same thing,” she recalls. Her tumor was a “slow-growing” Grade 2 oligodendroglioma and brain surgery offered a promising outlook for her.

“The best option would be to get as much of the tumor out as possible … without doing harm,” she says. “They (laid) out all the benefits, all the risks, which is obviously a scary analysis to think of when it’s your life.”

Despite knowing the risks of brain surgery, which can include some impairment or even death, Young understood that she needed it.

“It’s pretty obvious that I couldn’t keep going about my life having seizures off and on (and) then eventually let more cancer be in the brain to potentially keep growing and keep causing more neurological impacts,” she says.

About a month after doctors found the tumor, Young underwent surgery in March. The wait felt nerve-wracking.

“All of your fears come out, all of the stress, all the anxiety,” she says. “I want my life. I want time with my kids. I want my kids to have time with me, and to face that fear, it’s a mental hurtle. To write goodbye notes to my kids before surgery was like no one should ever have to write a goodbye note to their kids.”

Even the day of the surgery, Young worried.

“When you’re in the pre-op area, your heart’s racing,” she says. “I’m literally putting my life in the hands of these doctors.”

Doctors used Medtronic’s StealthStation Navigation to map Young’s brain during surgery. This helped them remove 95% of the tumor, she says.

“They left some of it in there because it was sitting too close to my motor cortex, and they didn’t want to risk any mobility issues,” Young explains. “I didn’t think I’d ever say, ‘Oh, I’m thankful that doctors left cancer in my body.’ But I’m literally so thankful doctors left cancer in my body because I’ve been able to go back to living a relatively normal life.”

Oligodendroglioma

Oligodendroglioma is a brain tumor that impacts the cells that bolster the nerves in the brain, Dr. Todd Thompson says.

“When people think of brain cancer, they think of the nerves in the brain, but most of the cells in the brain are the cells that support the nerves,” the neurosurgeon and senior director of medical safety at Medtronic, who did not treat Young, tells TODAY.com. “Oligodendrocytes are a type of cell that supports the nerves.”

About 1,131 people are diagnosed with an oligodendroglioma annually in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute. Thompson calls them “uncommon but still more common than we’d like.” It’s not a cancer that’s considered to have “a genetic component,” and experts are unsure why they occur.

“I don’t want to trivialize it,” Thompson says. “It’s, to some extent, bad luck. Cells have very complex programming and sometimes that programming goes sideways.”

Most patients, about 60%, per the NCI, experience a seizure prior to diagnosis. Thompson says signs of oligodendroglioma include:

• Weakness
• Numbness
• Trouble speaking
• Seizure
• Headaches
• Trouble with vision

“If you have symptoms, it’s always good to be evaluated,” Thompson says.

Treatment of oligodendroglioma often includes surgery and radiation, and some patients might also qualify for immunotherapy. Advances in neurosurgery help many patients have good prognoses.

“We can plan the surgery before going into the operating room,” he says. “(During surgery) we have this roadmap that can guide us to the tumor and equally as important keep us away from those important parts of the brain that we don’t want to disrupt or injure.”

‘I learned gratitude’

Only 48 hours after surgery, Young left the hospital to stay with her parents to “recover in the relative calm,” she says. Her husband and mother-in-law were caring for her three children at home. Young noticed that she experienced terrible brain fog as she recovered from surgery.

“You still feel like you’re normal, but then you can’t find your keys. You can’t find your sunglasses. You left the TV on overnight,” she says. “I wasn’t doing these things prior to surgery.”

Worried that the brain fog would impact her ability to work as a finance manager, she started speech and occupational therapy.

“The speech therapy (was) more (focused) around executive functioning,” she says. “So giving me a lot of skills to be able to come back to my job.”

As time progressed, Young experienced less brain fog.

“I’m really thankful that I advocated for myself to get those referrals because it’s hard when you’re faced with your own failures —especially as a person who’s used to being a very competent, highly effective individual,” she says. “It probably took a good two months to get all of that functioning back to where it felt like was an acceptable level.” 

Young is on a “watch and wait protocol,” where she undergoes regular scans to make sure the tumor isn’t growing. If it does, doctors will reconsider her treatment plan.

Undergoing treatment for a brain tumor has helped Young appreciate life more.

“I learned gratitude in a way that I don’t think you can really experience until you go through something pretty terrible,” she says. “These things that felt like burdens before suddenly it’s a gift that I get to do this.”

Having a cancer diagnosis or facing difficult challenges can feel isolating, and Young hopes that her story helps others who feel alone.

“If my story can provide any peace for someone else who’s going through a cancer diagnosis … that’s a great reason to share,” she says.