Taylor Swift hasn’t stopped since releasing her seventh album, Lover last August. Since then, she’s been busy with a limited tour, press for the head-scratcher Cats (she has no regrets), plans to re-record her previous material, and preparing the premiere of Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, a Netflix documentary about her career and her place in pop culture that comes out on January 31. But between it all, Swift has been dealing with some pretty devastating family news: She revealed this week that her mother Andrea, who’s been battling cancer since 2015, has a brain tumor, which doctors discovered through her treatment.
Swift opened up about her mom’s health in a long profile that Variety ran this week. Their relationship has been a close-knit one, and Swift has already written two songs—”Soon You’ll Get Better” and “The Best Day”—about her battle with cancer. “Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness,” Swift said during the interview before talking about the tough moment in which the tumor was discovered. “While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor. And the symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family.”
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Swift explained that her mother is part of the reason why she’s planning to only play four stadium dates in America this summer and several festivals in Europe. “I feel like I haven’t done festivals, really, since early in my career—they’re fun and bring people together in a really cool way. But I also wanted to be able to work as much as I can handle right now, with everything that’s going on at home. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could do both those things,” she said.
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She went further into what Andrea is going through and added, “I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose. It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on.”
It started with crosswords. Or rather, the lack of them. Or rather, the lack of me doing them. My brain was a little muddled, and names were not coming to me as easily as they once had, so suddenly crosswords weren’t as fun. Also books. And scary movies. And talking to people. I blamed the baby who’d suddenly taken up residence in my body.
I had complicated feelings about becoming a mom. As a feminist, I wondered how this new person would affect my work and how my work would affect this new person. How would I make sure I still had interesting things to talk about and not turn into a mom person who only wanted to chat about her kid? How would I keep my identity clear to myself, my husband, and this human?
I was between acting jobs when I got pregnant, and therefore was forced to a very luxuriously long (and very frustratingly unpaid) maternity leave. (Shockingly, no one was looking to hire a pregnant actress for non-pregnant parts.) It was the longest break I’d taken from working since I was 12. And surprisingly? I was into it. I was obsessed with the creature inside me, and what kind of curtains that person might enjoy as I decorated our nursery. I’ve never cared about curtains so much in my life.
Alison Pill in The Newsroom.
Courtesy of HBO
Then I hit my third trimester and discovered that one of the great tragedies in the life of a pregnant lady is being unable to sleep. The little monster inside of me had taken my body’s stillness at night as an invitation to perform their own dances and yoga routines. It was wonderful…and annoying.
As a result of only sleeping from 3 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. most days (feeling thankful for every precious minute) and dealing with wave after wave of hormone changes, my brain was feeling…different. Less rested, more volatile. As the months passed, I gave up on crosswords past Thursday. I gave up on books that weren’t hilariously addictive crime fiction (Carl Hiassen in particular gave me joy in those very uncomfortable months). I gave up on movies that couldn’t guarantee a happy ending. And conversations about anything other than puppies and rainbows.
I hadn’t even given birth yet and already I had “mom brain”—I couldn’t have the same conversations or read the same books. I felt less and less recognizable to myself.
Eventually, the creature keeping me up all night from inside my body began keeping me up all night while outside of my body. It was a thrilling change becoming a mom, but did nothing for my sleep habits or my emotional consistency. I was a human puddle of hormones, thrilled when I got to have a shower, let alone a conversation with my husband that didn’t revolve around feeding schedules. I started to feel lonely, as so many new moms do—understandable given the person you spend the most time with sees you as a pair of nipples and a warm body. That person doesn’t share your love of Russian literature, or your interest in great plays. That person wants milk, sleep, cuddles, and to figure out how to make their eyes work. Fascinating and inspiring and beautiful though they are, infants are terrible conversationalists.
Deep into the disorienting haze of mom brain, I came upon a study outlining how pregnancy literally reduces the gray matter of your brain. The gist is that through “synaptic pruning,” a pregnant woman’s brain goes through a change similar to adolescence in its restructuring—some aspects of your cognition become weaker while others become sharper in an effort to better tailor your brain to the challenges of motherhood.
The idea that my brain was redefining what it could and would do was terrifying. I’d spent nine months surrendering so many things I thought were essential to my being—my body, my job, my irresponsibility. No one mentioned I’d also be giving up my brain as I knew it. But reading the study made me feel like someone had reached out to say, “It’s okay. Your brain is normal. You’ll be alright.” My lizard brain desire to protect my kid and lack of patience for social interactions that felt inauthentic suddenly made sense. Evolution is cool like that.
Motherhood did change my identity, right down to my gray matter, but not in the scary ways I’d feared. I used to have hours in a day to learn lines, to dream up character ideas, to wallow in self-indulgent actor stuff. Now I only have nap time to do all that but I find my brain can shift into different modes so much more swiftly. Mom brain isn’t such a bad thing.
Alison Pill and Wilder.
Joshua Leonard
More than anything, I’ve learned it’s impossible to get it right as parents, and yet, we do it anyway. Accepting the less-than-perfect scenario is my new cognitive superpower, and momhood lets me practice it every single day.
My kid is three now and my mom brain has continued evolving—mostly thanks to the fact that I now cohabitate with a little Question Machine. I try to limit myself to one “just because” answer per day, which means I have to do a lot of research. It’s exciting and humbling to realize just how little you know when grilled by a three-year-old.
My mom brain has become a time management expert, a more humble and patient servant, and a curious challenger—and I’ve never been more grateful for the work it does. Even if it means I don’t do crosswords all that often anymore. After all, I’ve got to use my mom brain to explain optical physics (AKA rainbows) to my three-year-old.
Alison Pill is mom to Wilder and also an actor. She can be seen in Star Trek: Picard and in the upcoming DEVS and Them.
The conversation on fertility—whether you’re thinking about kids in the near future or not—is still plagued by anxiety-inducing messages that keep women up at night picturing a ticking biological clock. Women deserve better—no fear mongering, just facts. So Glamour took the pulse of what women do and don’t know about their reproductive health to bring you the Modern State of Fertility.
My roommate came with me to my first IVF class. We took our seats between a couple and a woman there on her own. She had a folder full of information; her eagerness apparent in the tapping of her foot, her informed questions, her careful note taking. The couple held hands and smiled. Under the table, I texted the friend who’d be picking me up for the next doctor’s appointment. I’ll be late.People have lots of questions.
I had no questions, and little interest in being in the class at all. It was required to attend by the clinic I was working with—a clinic I hadn’t researched or purposefully chosen, the clinic I had ended up with because it was affiliated with the team of doctors treating my newly diagnosed brain cancer.
After months of brain fog, memory problems, and word finding issues I’d assumed were related to the stress of grad school, an MRI revealed a tumor in my brain—anaplastic astrocytoma grade 3, to be exact, in the same class as highly terminal glioblastoma. One craniotomy, ICU stay, and pathology report later, I found myself staring blankly as a doctor explained that the chemo I needed would likely destroy my chance of getting pregnant someday, should I ever want to do so.
Fertility was far from my mind. I was 27, busy pursuing my Masters in social work, hanging out with my friends and my girlfriend, and dreaming about being financially stable enough to get my first dog. The doctor suggested I look into fertility preservation as soon as possible. “You want to give yourself the chance,” he said, “just in case.” Suddenly I was on what my doctors called the fertility “fast track”—my appointments, medications, even my enrollment in the IVF info sessions expedited to get ahead of the vigorous regimen of radiation and chemotherapy I was about to endure.
I wanted more than just a chance at motherhood; having children has always been a dream. For as long as I can remember I’ve pictured starting a family one day—just one day very far in the future. Adding to the ambiguity, I’m in a queer, same-sex relationship and I hadn’t even begun to think about how my partner and I might go about having kids. We weren’t even certain we’d even end up together. We’ve been dating for almost two years, and while it seems likely that we are heading in the direction of marriage at some point, we are definitely not ready to have kids together. We’d barely talked about moving in together or whether she’d come to Thanksgiving next year, let alone whether we’d want to conceive biologically, adopt, or foster. We were, and are, at the beginning of considering a life together—a time that should be filled with the glow of possibility, the freedom to dream without commitment.
Navigating the line between what we’d decide together, and what was up to me, became a new challenge in our relationship. We went together to appointments, but she let me do the talking and the decision making. She told me it was my body, my future, and she’d be there beside me no matter what I did. I was grateful, but mourned a world in which we’d have had the time to know what we’d wanted together, to be able to fully have her on my team.
Emilia Clarke, best known for her role as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, recently opened up about the brain aneurysms that almost took her life. In an essay for The New Yorker, Clarke said she suffered the first aneurysm when she was 24 years old, shortly after completing filming for season one of Game of Thrones. She was rushed to the E.R. after collapsing at the gym with an excruciating headache and was left with temporary aphasia, or language impairment, after her first surgery. Then doctors discovered a second aneurysm that required a second surgery. Clarke was terrified she’d never act again.
“My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, around communication,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “Without that, I was lost.”
Now, in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Clarke has shared more about her surgeries and recovery—even sharing some new never-before-seen photos of herself in the hospital.
“So, with the second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died,” she says of her second aneurysm in the interview. “If a part of your brain doesn’t get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It’s like you short-circuit. So I had that. And they didn’t know what it was. They literally were looking at the brain and being like, ‘Well, we think it could be her concentration, it could be her peripheral vision [affected].'”
“I always say it’s my taste in men that’s no longer there,” she continues. “That’s the part of my brain, yeah, my decent taste in men.”
While she’s able to joke about it now, there was a time when the actress was very scared about what her future might look like. “I was like, ‘What if something has short-circuited in my brain and I can’t act anymore?'” she says. “I mean, literally it’s been my reason for living for a very long time.”
See Clarke’s hospital photos—and the full interview—below:
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In the interview Clarke reveals that she actually found it easier to stay optimistic during her second surgery and recovery than her first. When asked how she got through it all, the mother of dragons answered, “That was very much like a day-to-day thing. And I definitely went through a period of being down, putting it mildly.”
Luckily, Clarke did indeed pull through and has since founded a charity called SameYou, which is focused on brain injury recovery and rehabilitation.
You never really imagine seeing your name and the words “death,” “coma,” and “paralysis” on the same page until you do—until you get a letter from your neurosurgeon that says all of those things alongside the words “brain aneurysm.” Then, it’s like freezing, cold water running over your naked body. Even though the stated likelihood of such things happening is astronomically low. Because for anyone with a genuine interest in being alive, any likelihood of death is already way too high.
I rang in the new year with weird headaches: inside my head, it felt like little tumbleweeds made of needles were rolling around my brain every time I coughed, or laughed. I’d literally have to stop and freeze mid-giggle to allow them to pass. I pushed my neurologist for an MRI because your girl was not about to go down like this. That’s when we found a pretty large aneurysm chillin’ in my brain, a few inches behind my right eye.
My first thought was that I had to give my aneurysm a name, a personality, some flare to make her exciting. I call her Annie.
You may think this is an odd reaction to finding out you are a 23-year-old with a brain aneurysm, but if Annie the Aneurysm is living in my brain rent-free, I’m at least going to have a bit of fun with her. I figure Annie is probably a white lady with a lot of problematic but well-meaning thoughts who would probably ask to speak with your manager. She definitely doesn’t like alcohol or drugs (especially cocaine), and she’s a stickler about high blood pressure and cholesterol. Annie certainly wasn’t invited to my brain (is Annie ever really invited anywhere?) but she clearly doesn’t mind crashing a party. I can’t really blame her—between social justice musings, Bad Bunny verses, and enchilada cravings, my brain must be a grand ol’ time.
My neurosurgeon explained that a lot of people have their own Annie—in the most comforting of voices, he made it clear that unruptured aneurysms are common, very much treatable, and not something over which I should lose much sleep. Yeah, okay sure. But if Annie decides to throw a rager and pop, it could be deadly. My neurosurgeon explained that I have an estimated 3 percent likelihood of rupture in the next five years—30 percent in the next 20 years. Annie’s gotta go.
When I took Annie for a photoshoot (aka an angiogram), to learn exactly when we could schedule this farewell party, my neurologist learned Annie was bigger than we thought. She’s even sprouted a mini aneurysm of her own. Though the initial plan was to send a teeny tiny catheter into the artery near my hip, route it through my blood vessels, into my brain, and straight into Annie’s crib, I’m now debating between a version of this procedure and open-head surgery. Because I’m only 23, and because I want to get rid of Annie once and for all, a part of me is leaning toward the open-head surgery in hopes of limiting the farewell parties to just one.
Either surgery won’t happen for a bout a month—in the meantime, Annie is still here, cozied up in my head. Since she arrived, I’ve been getting rather existential. Even after my doctor explained the plan of action, seeing it all in print in the letter he sent me was still a little jarring. I re-read one statistic my neurosurgeon included: approximately one in a thousand people are likely to die or to experience permanent disability from aneurysm treatments.
Instead of freaking out, I decided to hold and respect the possibility that it could be me, that I could be that one. And, if this were the case, my body’s inability to fend for itself would not have been the result of poor medical treatment. Having lost a sister to cancerous brain tumors when I was very young, I have never really seen doctors as saviors, nor seen death as a choice. We are all headed in the same direction—whether Annie pops and gives me a mean ‘lil stroke or whether I meet some other finale, it’s an end that we will all eventually meet.
Game of Thrones star Lena Headey wrote a beautiful, supportive message to her costar Emilia Clarke, who revealed in a New Yorker essay on Thursday (March 21) she had suffered two brain aneurysms while filming the hit HBO show.
“It took me a while to know this woman (there are 64000 of us after all),” Headey posted on Instagram alongside a photo of Clarke. “Not until she spoke to me about her experience did I fully realize the warrior she truly is (MOD for real x209840000) she does really great things for causes that deserve it. She’s kind and determined and funny and aware. #Thursday’s MVP … Here’s to @emilia_clarke ?????⭐️⭐️⭐️?.”
MOD, for uninitiated into Game of Thrones, means Mother of Dragons, the nickname of Clarke’s character on the show.
Lena Headey plays Cersei Lannister on GoT, and Emilia Clarke plays Daenerys. Their characters hardly interact onscreen—they’ve shared only one scene—which is why Headey’s message is particularly exciting.
In her essay, Clarke outlines her emotional journey with the two brain aneurysms, which happened at such busy times in her life and career.
“I lost all hope,” Clarke writes. “I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. There was terrible anxiety, panic attacks. I was raised never to say, ‘It’s not fair’; I was taught to remember that there is always someone who is worse off than you. But, going through this experience for the second time, all hope receded. I felt like a shell of myself. So much so that I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail. My mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn’t going to live.”
Read Clarke’s piece in its entirety here. Game of Thrones season eight premieres Sunday, April 14, at 8:00 P.M. ET on HBO.
