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Pluck of the Irish |
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Gerri and Brian Monaghan battled his brain cancer and finished stronger for the struggle, with a new book sharing their story of hope.
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GATHER ’ROUND. Brian Dennis Sean Monaghan—quintessential Irishman, bon vivant, proud father and grandfather, human guinea pig and medical miracle—has one hell of a story to tell. A story he helped write but cannot read. A life drama in which he is protagonist and foil, confidant and narrator, hapless underdog and tenacious slayer of dragons.
Dial back to the spring of 1998. Brian, 59, is riding high. At “the top of his game,” he will tell you. His law practice is thriving, as is his second marriage. He and his wife, Gerri, are living the good life, nestled in their spacious Point Loma home overlooking San Diego Bay. Life is good. Life is wonderful—and capricious.
In May of that year, Brian was told he had Stage IV melanoma that had spread and formed two tumors on his brain. Stage IV melanoma. There is no Stage V. Doctors informed Brian he had three to six months to live. With aggressive treatment—and a bit of Irish luck—maybe a little longer. How does a reasonable person respond to the prognosis we all dread?
“It was a fact that just came at me, like somebody hit me,” Brian says. “I didn’t panic. I didn’t freeze. In the first few moments, I was just trying to understand it. Trying to fathom what it meant exactly.”
And then, as though on cue, Brian Monaghan, pragmatic attorney-at-law, came to the fore. “Almost immediately, I wanted to get back to the office and straighten things out so that everything could continue,” he recalls.
Gerri’s first reaction was far more visceral. “It’s like the air is suddenly sucked out of your lungs,” she says. “That night, Brian and I made a promise to each other: We’re going to fight this. And we’re going to win.”
A WONDERFUL WORLD
When they married in 1995, Brian and Gerri Monaghan seemed the embodiment of predestined love. He grew up in an Irish family in Philadelphia; she was raised by Irish parents in New York City. He had two children, Kathi and Patrick, from a previous marriage; she was divorced and had two sons, Todd and Mark Wortmann. (All of the children are within three years of each other in age.) Brian was a skilled trial attorney; Gerri was an accomplished paralegal. And they both were avid sports enthusiasts.
“It seemed like Gerri and I had been together for years,” says Brian. “Here I was, me of all people, with this gorgeous, intelligent woman.”
-Brian Monaghan
The wedding was held in their home in Point Loma. They chose “What a Wonderful World”—their song—for the first dance. Surrounded by friends and family, they moved with the music as the deep, unmistakable voice of Louis Armstrong washed over them:
“And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”
A few short years later, their world would take a terrible turn.
FORESHADOWING
At first, the troubling signs were subtle, merely nuanced. In April 1998, Brian began to experience frequent bouts of fatigue—what he describes as “all-encompassing weariness.” However, he had recently wrapped up an intense, three-month trial in which he won a nearly $2 million verdict for one of his clients. There had been long days in the courtroom, long nights in the office. So of course he was run-down. He set out to catch up on some much-needed rest. Still, he was dogged by exhaustion.
There was also the seismic shift in his personality. Once the proverbial life of the party who routinely regaled guests with his Irish jokes and stories, Brian became reticent. He would later acknowledge that the once-familiar plot lines and punch lines were somehow elusive, suddenly beyond the grasp of memory. Anecdotes he had repeated again and again faded in a frustrating, puzzling mist. And he was finding it increasingly difficult to mask his confusion.
“It was as if I was in a fog,” Brian recalls. “One that just wouldn’t clear.”
The signs were there, and they were mounting—blinding headaches and occasions when Brian was unable to string words together in speech or comprehend them in print. In May, Gerri arranged for him to undergo magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Ever the optimist, Brian says even at that point he wasn’t “overly concerned.” That same afternoon, May 21, 1998, the results of the MRI were in. They were conclusive—and devastating. Brian and Gerri, seated in their physician’s office, were told the MRI revealed two brain tumors. Two.
At first, total silence.
Dr. Daniel Einhorn recalls trying to soften the terrible impact of the diagnosis with expressions like “This is preliminary” and “There are many possibilities.”
The visit is a blur in Brian’s memory. But for Gerri, it was a dawning realization that she and Brian were in for the fight of their lives.
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