Six surgeries, spinal meningitis, and months later, they removed the last of the stubborn, golf-ball-size growth and its tentacle-like roots.

I’d worked as a bartender, truck driver, construction worker – whatever physical labor paid the bills. Until the tumor. Toward the end of the following year – after a rehabilitation program – I anxiously registered for junior college while wondering if I was too damaged, or – nearly 38 – too old.

Starting college again took encouragement from family and friends. In the late 60s, more interested in beer bashes than business classes, my 1.8 GPA earned me a permanent sabbatical. Two decades and six brain tumor surgeries later, success seemed even less likely.

Once in school I felt like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Surrounded by classmates 20 years my junior, I struggled with damaged vision, poor mobility, and rusty study skills. In fact, because I’d been out of school since the Nixon administration, my study skills were more than rusty; they were nearly non-existent. An after-school study skills class helped.

But even though things were working out, self-pity plagued me like a hungry mosquito on a warm August night. Thus far it’d been a steady diet of me, me, me – my wants and needs. Yet it seemed the more I focused on me, the worse I felt – and I didn’t know how to change that.

During this first semester I attended counseling sessions. I showed-up expecting soothing words, unconditional support. But after listening to my sob story of how unfair life had treated me, my counselor leaned forward in his chair – as if he were about to tell me the key to the meaning of life – and calmly said, "Bill, ‘sympathy’ is in the dictionary between ‘sh@#’ and ‘syphilis’. Stop sucking on your thumb and focus on someone else for a change."

I was appalled. This, of course, wasn’t what I wanted to hear – but it was exactly what I needed to be told. By this time even I was sick of me. Bored with whining, and eager to get relief from myself, I grudgingly contemplated his no-nonsense suggestion.

But it didn’t make sense – how could helping someone else make a difference? Altruism, as you might have guessed, was a foreign concept to me.

With time and counseling I came to accept some unpalatable facts about myself – my problem wasn’t really my disabilities, my age, what others thought of me. My problem was my attitude – self-absorbed; always looking at my glass as half-empty instead of half-full; the belief that self worth depended on someone else’s opinion of me.

Following my counselor’s suggestion I began volunteer work. Soon afterward, feeling suspiciously better, I also joined a campus group engaged in community service. This helped me make friends, find opportunities to be useful, and develop healthy self-worth. It also lessened my suffocating self-absorption.

Not only did I start to feel better but – to my surprise – these activities helped me qualify for scholarships. For instance, the Kiwanis Club offered a scholarship based, not on grades, but on community service. That first scholarship further enhanced my self-respect.

By graduation from the University of South Florida, I’d received a dozen scholarships and awards – and nobody was more surprised than me. The University of Florida offered a fellowship to graduate school.

Although an education became my goal, helping others has been essential to a balanced life. It’s helped remind me there’s more to life than getting good grades or another degree.

When not feeling the way I like to feel, it might mean it’s time to get away from the computer and books to eat something healthy, relax or do some exercise. But it often means I’ve been too wrapped-up in myself and what I think is important. Experience has shown me it often means it’s time to focus on someone else for a while.

Since returning to school I’ve been involved in a variety of volunteer efforts. Today I participate in an online discussion group for those with brain tumors.

I’m not sure how much my suggestions and personal experience help those I have contact with, but I am certain of this: it rarely fails to put things in perspective. Reaching out to someone struggling with a brain tumor always reminds me how different my life has become since nearly dying – several times – in 1985.

It remains a mystery to me why I’ve been so fortunate – my family has been wonderfully supportive. The least I can do, it seems to me, is spend some time each day helping someone else.

Today, while completing a PhD, I often ponder the life I’ve been privileged to experience since that crisis fourteen years ago. But, as someone once pointed out, the Chinese language uses two symbols for the English word crisis – one represents danger, the other opportunity.

Although I may never know why I developed that brain tumor, it seems it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

Copyright © 1999 Bill Asenjo. All rights rserved.

Bill Asenjo, M.S., CRC is a Ph.D. candidate

in the University of Iowa’s Rehabilitation Counselor Education program. His dissertation focuses on alternative medicine and disability.