Lemon-Sized Brain Tumor: The Life That Grew After Surgery
From The Life Shift | Conversations About Life Before and After by Matt Gilhooly
June 7, 2026 · 1h 2m · Season 5 · Episode 254
About this episode
Jen Dary shares her journey of facing a brain tumor and the profound personal transformation that followed.
Some moments don't announce themselves. They arrive as headaches you explain away, as an MRI you schedule between school pickups and client calls. And then your phone rings ten minutes after you get home, and everything you thought you knew about your life gets quietly rearranged. Jen Dary was 35, a business owner and new mom to two babies, when a neurologist told her she had a lemon-sized brain tumor sitting behind her left eye. What followed wasn't just a medical crisis. It was a complete unraveling of who she thought she was supposed to be, and a slow, surprising reconstruction of who she actually wanted to become. In this conversation, Jen talks about the strange calm that preceded brain surgery, the spiritual visions that carried her through, and the grief that arrived weeks later in a coffee shop. She shares what it looks like to release the identity that doesn't fit anymore, and how she came to understand her life less as something that happened to her, and more as something she might have chosen. What You'll Hear: The phone call that changed everything, and the strange quiet before she told anyone How Jen organized, planned, and kept moving as a way to survive the shock…
People in this episode
Host: Matt Gilhooly
Guest: Jen Dary
Topics covered
- brain tumor
- identity shift
- personal growth
- spiritual experiences
- memoir writing
Keywords
- brain tumor
- surgery
- identity
- spiritual visions
- memoir
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: The Life Shift, neurologist, coffee shop
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