Prognosis and Diagnosis
Jeanne Lee
As Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts, Greg had been afflicted by a meningioma roughly the size of an orange, and though it did not seem to cause him pain, his eyesight gradually deteriorated and he became a completely different person under the care of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in the Brooklyn temple. As a follower in the temple, he found himself more content: "obedient, ingenuous, devoted, and pious" (43). Even so, he underwent unforeseen changes, loss of eyesight just the beginning of a series of very unfortunate events.
According to the Centre for Neuro Skills, these are not uncommon symptoms of damage to the frontal lobe, which typically mans “motor function, problem solving, spontaneity, memory, language, initiation, judgement, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior.” However heedless his peers were in regard to his symptoms, there was clear evidence of the damage that had been done, even before the diagnosis. Even so, the fellow was observed to have retained his semantic and procedural memory processing, as he was still able to logically reason through things of the mathematical nature, for instance, and he was able to build upon the musical knowledge he had already known before the development of the tumor (52). Furthermore, he was capable of familiarization through habituation, and could grow familiar with his new environment; granted, this took a while, but surely he was able to retain any information given the time to grasp it over extended periods of time and repetition (53).
The meningioma itself did not seem to be lethal, but Dr. Sacks recalls that the tumor had "destroy[ed] the pituitary gland and the adjacent optic chiasm and tracts" as well as the frontal lobe in its growth - expected results of the tumor given the symptoms that had manifested. When his parents discovered how dramatically different he had become, he was at last examined and the tumor was removed. He was ultimately admitted to the Williamsbridge Hospital, where he would stay among other chronically mentally ill patients, unsure of why he was to live in the hospital at all (45).
