A Problem Unsolved

He sat in the MUSC children’s emergency room for hours. What was the source of all this pain?

He waited and waited and waited.

The doctor came in.

“Probably just a migraine,“ he said.

“I kept thinking this isn’t just a migraine, my mom always get migraines… And I just knew whatever she had was way different than what I had,” Goldberg said.

Huft pressured the doctors for more of an answer, but they had none for them. Instead, they referred him to a migraine specialist to get an MRI, just to rule out a few things.

A week passed. He was looking forward to finding out if he made Show Choir for his sophomore year,.

“He had a great end of the year audition — he did everything perfectly and earned a spot in Show Choir as a sophomore, which is pretty rare,” Chorus Director Eric Wilkinson said.

He was spending his free time with his older brother, who would soon be going to college. Goldberg was busy being a normal kid.
But then an unfamiliar phone number kept calling Huft’s phone at her older son’s graduation party. Huft sent the caller to voicemail.

But then she listened to the voicemail. The caller was from MUSC.

“You need to come down to the hospital because we see something on the brain scan,” she heard on the recorded message.
Huft’s singing, dancing and happy son was sick.

“She was really sad, I had no idea anything was wrong, but she was talking quietly,” Goldberg said. “I could tell she didn’t want to tell me, so for five minutes, I kept asking her what was wrong.”

The color drained from his mother’s face. Her cracked voice said words that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“You have a brain tumor,” Huft told her son.

Goldberg thought of sick patients in hospital beds. A bad headache? A blurry vision? That was a brain tumor?