Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and it is time for some self-brain surgery.
It is Wild Card Wednesday, and yesterday I brought you back an old episode about
a character from my book, Hope is the First Dose, who had a problem where he
couldn't stop seeing the massive thing that was happening to him.
And today I'm going to give you a second character from the book,
Hope is the First Dose, because a lot of people are writing in on the prayer
wall and sending us prayer requests and telling us about how they feel stuck.
And sometimes your life can just pile a bunch of stuff on you and you can be stuck.
You don't know what to do. You don't know how to move forward.
And sometimes after trauma or tragedy or these massive things happen,
we can get stuck in a grief cycle or rumination cycle or fear or anxiety or
worry can pile up and we just don't know how to move forward.
And there's a story in the book about a woman named Tina Tisdale who got stuck
and it had a tragic outcome for her. And I don't want that to happen to you.
So this is a story about what to do when you feel stuck, some of the ways that
we can get stuck and some ways that we can get unstuck using a treatment plan
for changing our minds and changing our life.
So without further ado, here's a story from Hope is the First Dose.
I think it's gonna help you.
I had a strong urge this morning that somebody needed to hear this.
So if that was you, send us an email, lee at drleewarren.com.
Let us know that you were benefited by this episode. Share it with a friend
if you think it'll help somebody.
We're praying for you. We'll be back tomorrow with Theology Thursday.
I'm going to go to the operating room this morning. Lisa and I have a lot of
cool things going on that we'll be sharing with you soon.
And just praying for you. Don't forget the prayer wall, w1mb.com slash prayer. Let's get after it.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything.
Starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
This is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
But today, I'm going to do the second in a series of talking about some of the
characters and themes from the book.
And today, there's a lady named Tina Tisdale that we're going to talk about.
A couple of weeks ago, we did an episode called Anthony Walker is Hammered.
And there's a guy in the book named Anthony Walker who got hit in the head with a hammer.
And it cost him the ability to move his face on one side.
And he couldn't close his eye. When you can't close your eye,
then your cornea will dry out.
And you eventually will lose vision because you can't stop looking.
And we talked about how we do that in our lives sometimes. We can't stop looking
at the things that are hurting us.
And eventually that just focus and unrelenting gaze will cause the loss of the
ability to see anything else. And that's Anthony's story.
Well, today Tina's story is similar but very different in a couple of different ways.
And we're going to get into that in a minute. I just want to remind you that
you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And we're going to do that. Today, though, we're going to finish the episode after the outro.
I'm going to give you a little music just to spend a minute.
To think about if you can't learn to look away from a problem and look on to
something else, something bigger, something more hopeful, something more helpful,
then you're going to have a problem like Anthony did, like Tina did.
And so I'm going to give you an Alan Jackson song. It's an old hymn,
Turn Your Eyes on Jesus, and Alan Jackson did an incredible version of it.
It's just stunning, and it would be a great way to just worship and think a
little bit about some of the things that we might need to look away from and
look towards if we're going to learn finally how to start today.
I first met her in the emergency department, and my friend John had called me to come down and see her.
And Tina had had a brain tumor a couple of years before, a benign brain tumor called meningioma.
And the cool thing about meningioma is if you're going to have a brain tumor,
it's a great one to have often because if we can remove it, then you're usually cured.
It doesn't require chemotherapy. It doesn't require radiation.
It doesn't always recur, and it doesn't usually cost people their lives.
And so meningioma, if you have to have a brain tumor, is a good kind to have
because potentially it's curable.
So Tina had had this surgery a couple of years before I met her.
And she came to the emergency department one day with a complaint that she thought
she could feel her tumor growing back.
She felt a strange sensation in her head, some discomfort.
And she just was convinced that her tumor was growing back.
And we went under extensive workup. We did MRI scans, and I reviewed her records,
and we did all kinds of testing, and I spent hours with the radiologist looking
and looking and looking, trying to see if there was something going on,
comparing it to previous studies and all of that.
And at the end of the day, the fact was she was really cured of her disease. There was no tumor left.
There was nothing in her head that was any type of danger to her. The tumor was gone.
And you would think you'd be excited about that, right? But she had something
called post-craniotomy syndrome, and that's not terribly common,
but some people after brain surgery, they just never quite feel right.
They have a sensation from their incision inside their head,
and they feel kind of headachy, and they just don't ever kind of feel back to normal.
But most people are able to sort of account for the fact that they're not dying
of brain cancer or that their tumor's gone, and they're able to sort of move
on with the idea that, yeah, I've got some residual symptoms.
Symptoms, but I've got a cure for my underlying problem.
And that's okay for most people. But for Tina, it became this life altering thing.
She was convinced that there was something wrong and she couldn't stop thinking about it.
And it became the entire defining thing of her life that she was just absolutely
convinced that all the doctors were missing something that was going to hurt her.
And that thing became the defining focus of every moment of her life.
It just, It almost destroyed her marriage.
It kept her from being productive. It kept her from moving on in her life.
All she could think about was this idea that there was something wrong inside her head.
And this is ironic because the problem was all in her head, as we say metaphorically,
which means that there wasn't a real problem.
There wasn't a physical tumor that was causing those symptoms.
But she was convinced that there was something wrong in her head.
So she spent the rest of her life being convinced that she was dying of something
that she wasn't dying of.
And ultimately in frustration because she was so stressed out and so convinced
that everything was wrong and so focused on this problem that nobody else could
figure out, she took her own life.
This is tragic, right? It's devastating because all of us can look at this and
say, Tina, you're cured.
You should be grateful. You should be happy. Your problems are actually solved.
And yeah, you've got this leftover issue, but you're cured, right?
And her husband couldn't understand. It was causing stress in their marriage.
It was like, you want to be sick more than you want to be well.
And I counseled him, Rick, no, it's not that. She's just really convinced that
there's something wrong.
It's not that she wants to be sick. She just can't stop. She can't accept the
fact that you can have life, but you also have to have pain because in her mind,
she believed that if she was cured,
the pain would be gone and she could not accept the and. We talked about that before.
Like if you're focused on the but, like I was okay, but I got a tumor and now
I have pain and I'm not okay anymore and I can never be okay again,
then that becomes the beginning point of a downward spiral that will lead into
you having a life that's not abundant because it's defined by something that you can't control,
that's unpleasant to you, that defines you outside of who you really are.
But if you can learn to pivot, like Anthony did when he got the ability to close
his eye back when his face was fixed and he could squeeze his eye shut again,
he could stop looking at the pain and start looking at other stuff and smile
when he felt like it. But Tina couldn't learn the and.
We had to learn it after we lost Mitch because it was a real problem.
It was a crossroads for me.
Like I'm a happy guy, but I lost my son, and now I can't be happy anymore.
Or it could be a thing and not the thing.
I was a happy guy. I lost my son. I was really sad. I'll always be sad,
but I have many other things to live for.
And I can therefore find a way back to hope again. So you could find the and
in place of all those buts, right?
Tina couldn't find it and it cost her her life.
Listen, there's going to be some situations in your life, friend,
that you can't get rid of.
You just have to say, God is telling me in this particular instance that I can't have that.
There's a thing that I want that I can't have.
And so in order to find abundant life again, like Jesus promised you,
he came here for you to do in John 10.10, in order for you to have abundant
life, you're going to have to accept that there are some things that you can't have.
There are some prayers that won't be answered the way you want them to.
Timothy Keller, I think it's him. I'm going to quote this, and it may or may not be Keller.
So if you know who said this quote and it's not Keller, then please correct
me. Comment on the episode and I'll fix it.
I think it was Timothy Keller. It says, God answers our prayers either by giving
us what we want or by giving us what we would want if we knew everything that he knows.
That'll sink in in a minute. He'll either give you what you're asking for,
or he'll give you what you would ask for if you were as informed about your life as he is.
So for some reason, sometimes God finds it better to not answer what we're asking
him for in the way that we think would make us happy, because he knows more than we do.
And this reminds me of Paul in 2 Corinthians 12.
When Paul begs God to remove something. thing.
He says this 12, seven, second Corinthians 12, seven.
So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of
the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to
harass me, to keep me from being conceited.
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.
But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.
So listen, Paul, the apostle Paul, the guy who wrote Quote, two-thirds of the
New Testament had to accept pain as an ongoing part of his life.
He had to accept whatever the thorn in the flesh was. He had to accept the and.
Yes, I have this incredible life and God is allowing me to write the New Testament
and I've been saved by grace and I've been transformed and he even gave me a
new name and I had to live with the thorn in the flesh.
And he learned how to do that by embracing the fact that he could look at something
bigger, Jesus and his unchanging promises and the hope of eternal life and the
hope of a resurrected body and all those things that go along with the faith that we have.
He could look at that and focus on it. He could turn his eyes upon Jesus and
look away from the problem and towards the provider.
That's one of those Christian platitudes that sounds crazy, but it's really true. True.
If you have been given one of these things like Tina Tisdale's post-craniotomy
syndrome, like my grandfather's phantom limb syndrome that punished him for
his whole life after he had his leg amputated, he never stopped feeling pain
in his foot, even though the foot wasn't there anymore.
Phantom limb and post-craniotomy syndrome and all these things are reminders
of the fact that we're immortal bodies and we have some things that we can't fix.
We have some pain. I've got lots of patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy
and they're burning and tingling and their feet and hands, and they always will.
And they have to learn to live with that. It's just an ongoing part of life.
So listen, friend, if you want to become healthier, feel better and be happier,
if you wanna learn how to have an abundant life from John 10,
10, in spite of the hard life of John 16, 33,
you're going to have to learn to accept some thorns, to accept some pains, to accept some ands,
because there's some things you just can't have.
And one thing you can't always have is a perfect answer, in your opinion,
to the things that you're praying about.
But you can know that your Father, your Creator, is giving you the perfect answer
that He would give you if you knew everything that He knows about what you're really asking.
He's there. He's always working on your behalf.
If you can turn your eyes from the problem towards Him, that'll help you change
your mind and it'll help you change your life. Tina Tilsdale died because she.
Was drowning in the butt.
I was okay, but I got a brain tumor, and now I have pain, and I'm sure it's
coming back, and nobody can figure it out, and I'm going to die of this thing,
and all these doctors are idiots, and my husband doesn't understand,
and my life is just ruined, and I'm just going to take myself out. That's what she did.
And she could have instead pivoted to the end.
She could have said, I had this beautiful life, and I've got a family and a
husband who loves me, and I had this problem, and it turned out not to be cancer,
and the surgeons were able to cure me of it, and I've got some residual pain,
and it reminds me of the fact that I've been given this life again,
and I've got to learn how to process that pain and hold on to everything else that I still have.
She didn't understand. She couldn't accept the and, and she couldn't accept
the my grace is sufficient for you, but you can.
Friend, you can change your mind, and you can change your life.
You can learn to turn your eyes away from the problem and towards the provider.
Or you can turn your eyes on Jesus, you can change your mind and learn how to
make your brain work on your behalf, even when it hurts.
And my friend, the best news of all is that you can start today.
Music.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening.
The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my brand new book,
Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma,
tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.