Name
peter houston sorrells

Brain Tumor Type
Glioblastoma

Date of Diagnosis
04-6-2016

Participant Group
Caregiver/Family Member

Category
Creative Writing

Artist Statement (include type of art, techniques & materials used, what it means to you)
Brainstorming was originally written by me on the piano both lyrically per vocals and sonically per music. However I have since converted the words that once held space in the audio file into a poem specifically for this contest. I used an iphone voice notes app to record the track in its original form. It was written on the spot as a way of processing the days ahead, whatever that looked like. It remains to this day one of the most haunting yet simple pieces of art I have contrived from my beautiful confusion of a mind.

Artist Bio: Tell Us Your Story

My name is Ryan Lloyd Sorrells the eldest of my late father and this is my dad (Peter's) story. It is for all intensive purposes true to the best of my recollection and altogether both necessary and somewhat unabridged. The poem I have compiled together was from a song entitled: brainstorming, I tend to do my best art therapy when things are being recorded in my head versus written down on paper; both can be very effective though. The song was written the night prior to my late father's scheduled brain surgery.

To give you a little bit of background on the diagnosis it all came on rather sudden. He was completely healthy and had just lost a bunch of weight to get back into tip top shape due to high blood pressure and stress. Recently he had been struggling with headaches which by itself is one thing and not all that out of the ordinary...I mean who doesn't deal with that from time to time. I have headaches on a regular basis so I could totally relate. I just figured it was stress related due to his high stress job and that they would go away on their own; unfortunately it wasn't that simple. One day he started complaining of vision problems in addition to the headaches which were getting worse at the time so my brother suggested he go see an eye doctor. Long story short the eyes were fine and dad was strongly advised to see a neurologist instead to get a better picture of what we were looking at, had no idea it would turn into something so much more insidious.

Fast forward to two weeks later the tumor which had been discovered by the neurosurgeon ahead of time and needed to be removed was not a normal mass so an appointment had already been set up to move on the problem and eliminate its malignancy before it could do much more damage. We only prayed it wasn't too late stage wise because if it was cancer than we knew the survival rate was basically zero both from the experience of having lost people we knew before to the disease and having had no chance to prepare ourselves ahead of time for the possibility that this wasn't an exception either. It turned out the day before the surgery the tumor whom we hoped to render benign results had already grown by thirty percent since peter's initial consultation with his surgeon so we knew exactly what we were dealing with and the chances of living longer were not good. That's why I wrote this song because I wanted to get inside my dad's head and feel what he was thinking so it was written entirely from his perspective of what was to come.