Welcome to Chasing Life. Today's guest is Dr. Bobby McComola. He is a practicing head and neck surgeon.

He is also president-elect of the American Medical Association, which is the largest professional organization for physicians in the country.

They have more than 270,000 members. But perhaps most importantly for today's conversation,

Bobby is an old friend.

I've known him since the early 1990s when we were both medical students at the University of Michigan.

You and I would be in the reading room studying for half an hour, then we'd go downstairs to the refreshment area and hang out there for an hour, go back up and study.

So the ratio of studying to hanging out downstairs was less than ideal for learning.

But recently, I got the kind of news that you never want to get, especially from an old friend.

Here's what happened. A few months ago, Bobby was at an AMA conference, giving a speech, something he does all the time,

and partway through it, something really strange happened.

The words were coming out of his mouth, but they didn't make any sense.

It was more than gibberish, but it didn't come together as a sentence.

And somebody actually stood up and said, you know, we're having a hard time understanding

you. Now, this wasn't nerves. I mean, Bobby was in a room full of friends and colleagues.

Some of the doctors were immediately worried that maybe Bobby was having a stroke.

They've heard me give speeches, and they've never heard me sort of mess it up like that.

No surprise, he got checked out, and an MRI revealed the problem.

A glioma, a primary brain tumor, eight centimeters in size, and it was located in his left

medial temporal lobe.

Not too long after the diagnosis, Bobby wrote to me, and we had a long chat.

He wanted to talk.

And he also asked if maybe he could come on the podcast to talk about what had happened to him.

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