12 Years Hiding After Brain Tumor Surgery Finding His Way Back to Life

What happens when the surgery that saves your life leaves you struggling to recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror? And what happens when that struggle doesn't last a few weeks or a few months, but follows you for 12 years? Think about that for one moment. 12 years of looking at yourself differently. 12 years of wondering how people will respond when they see 12 years of potentially missing out on relationships, experiences, celebrations, and opportunities because being seen feels harder than staying home. We talk about surviving illness. We celebrate successful surgeries. We congratulate people for making it through difficult medical experiences. But we don't always talk about what happens. The hospital doors close. What happens when a physical crisis is over but the emotional battle is just beginning? Today we're talking about the relationship between our appearance and our identity and the stories we tell ourselves about what makes us acceptable and the courage it takes to stop hiding from life. Because sometimes the hardest part of survival is staying alive, and today's guest is John Kipping. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about our guest today. John is a professional magician, not a musician, but a magician, which I am totally excited. I thought he was going to come on and do some like magic tricks for us. But he is a professional magician, an author, a speaker, and a resilience coach whose life changed dramatically after he underwent a brain tumor surgery in 2012. 12, 2, excuse me. 2002, and the surgery left him with facial paralysis and spent years struggling with his appearance and withdrawing from the world. He's going to finish his story today with us on Keeping It Real On Purpose. Welcome to Keeping It Real On Purpose. Thank you, Edna. Okay, so tell us your story. I was born in Los Angeles to two great parents, both attorneys, upper middle class family, had everything I needed. Went to high school, got into theater, started performing, started working backstage, went to college as a theater major, stumbled into computers, started a computer consulting company, and everything was going great. I was in a relationship, and then I started having difficulty hearing men's voices in my left ear on the phone. I got checked out, and after many doctors finally got an MRI, and they found a four-centimeter golf ball-sized tumor in my head. And the surgeon who took it out basically looked at it and said, John, you have a four-centimeter acoustic neuroma. It's displacing your brainstem, and it's killing you. I've moved patients, and we're seeing you in the operating room. A week, you're going to go deaf in your left ear. There's a possibility of residual facial weakness, and he left the room. Wow. Wow. Laying something heavy on you like that and just walking out of the room. Yeah, he had no bedside manner whatsoever. Wow. But I had no choice in the matter. I couldn't go and see. I was at the best place for that kind of tumor in Los Angeles. So I was comfortable with his skill set. I just didn't think he had a very good bedside manner. Yeah, right, right. Did that make you feel some type of way? You know, I mean, did it make the situation worse, better? How did you feel, you know, even with, you know, regarding the bedside manner part? It pissed me off. I bet. When he pretty much said that and walked out, I opened the door and I heard his voice and I followed the voice to a little. Side room where when I opened the door, he was sitting on a little stool dictating a thank you note to the doctor who referred. And I said, doctor, we're not done with our conversation. That's good. And I actually pulled him back into the examining room and asked him more questions. Of course, I didn't remember the answer to the questions because I was in shock. Right, right. But, um, once I told them both my parents were attorneys, Yeah, then the whole story changed. Thank Then everything changed then, yeah, okay. So I went home, got my affairs in order, had one of my computer consultants that worked for me take over the business, and I went to the hospital the night before, you. tried to get some sleep, orderly came in six o'clock in the morning, said, okay, get undressed, get on this cold slab table. And put the blanket over you, and here we go. So, he rolled me down the hallway, into the elevator, into the operating room. And the nurse said, John, do you want me to shave your head now or afterwards? You're under. And I'm like, under, please. So, she did. And the next thing I know, I'm waking up in the recovery room 16 or 17 hours later. And the dizziness that I had experienced was gone, which was great. And my dad was sitting on the edge of the bed holding my hand. But I looked around the room and I didn't see my mom. So I asked for my glasses and I tried to put the glasses on and I realized my head was bandaged. So I had to kind of finagle them on. And I saw my mom standing in the corner. And the look on her face was one of horror. That gave it a kind of way. Due to my poor son's face. At that point, I didn't know my face was paralyzed because I had a whole feeling. I just can't move it. So the next time the doctor came in, I asked him, so what's going on with my face? And he said, well, we were measuring the electrical impulses to your facial nerve and everything was good till we closed the incision. So we thought it was just swelling. And once the swelling would go down, then facial nerve would recover. Wow. I waited and I waited and I waited. And after 18 months, I realized. It wasn't coming back. Yeah, it wasn't coming back, yeah. What was the emotional impact for you at that waiting point, and then you're like, okay, it's not coming back? What was it emotionally for you? It was really difficult because, again, I had covered all the mirrors in my house. I didn't even, you know, even the one in my bathroom. I didn't want to see my face. I didn't recognize the face that was looking back at me. And it wasn't the face that I knew and loved, which meant that it wasn't the... Face that people who knew me would know and love. And it was because I worked from home with my IT company, it made it easy to hide. Right. I was going to say, because it, you don't have to see anybody. You just do what you got to do. No. But I miss celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, bar mitzvahs. I miss so much of my life, the happy moments, you know, the celebration. Yeah. And then one day I went, oh, okay. I'm sorry, but people, I'm going to go to that point that you took. People often assume that once somebody survives a crisis like you or many others have, a serious medical crisis, that they should be totally grateful for however they come out of the situation alive. But Gratitude and grief, right, can exist at the same time. Can you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I was grateful that I was alive, that the surgery didn't do more damage, and the symptoms that I went into the operating room with were gone. Getting used to being deaf in my left ear was a challenge, though, because I would finally be with friends at dinner, and someone would sit on my left side and talk to me. And I wouldn't call them, not on purpose. It's just because I couldn't hear them. Right. And then waiters would come up to my left side and say something. And I would continue talking. And my friends would look at me like I was being rude to the waiter. Right. And it wasn't that I was being rude. I just didn't hear them. Yeah, it got a lot, it took a lot of getting used to on both parts, like your relationship to it, your family, friends, or whatever, so it kind of took some effort, would you say? Yeah, and then I lost the ability to sense the direction of sound. Okay. I tell a funny story, one night around 3 a.m., one of the batteries in one of my smoke detectors was low, and so it started chirping. Hmm. And so I got up, and I stood under the first smoke detector in my bedroom and waited and waited. Now it's not that one, and I ran to the kitchen and waited. Now it's not that one. I went into the living room, and I'm running around my house at 3 o'clock in the morning, wanting to go back to sleep, but knowing that I can't until I get out. And finally, I called my next-door neighbor, woke her up, and I said, Amy, please come over and help me find which smoke detectors are... So I can sleep. I'm going to sleep. So, you know, it's just, you know, it's something you have to get used to. Yeah. New normal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think at that time you were responding to the physical changes or what you were thinking about for the future, or was it both? It was my self-image. It was how I looked, how I perceived other people saw me. I decided to go out to dinner one night by myself. I was at a little restaurant called Tony Roma's. I was sitting in a booth having a cheeseburger, and the booth in front of me had a family with a five- or six-year-old boy. He was fidgeting and moving around and turned around and was kneeling on the bench just looking over the bench at me. His head was kind of tilted like a black lab, you know, how they do that. Yeah. And then he got up and he walked over to the table and looked at me and said, Mr., what's wrong with your face? And in that moment, I had two choices. I could just dismiss him or I could educate him. Right. And I decided to take the high road. But before I had a chance to speak, his mom saw him and grabbed him by the arm and said, don't bother the nice man. He has enough troubles already. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then I knew I had to engage with the little boy. Yeah, absolutely. So I walked over to the table and knelt down eye to eye with him. And I said, you know, you had a really good question. You see, I had a medical procedure that made me not be able to move my face. But it's my new face, and I like it because it's cool. It's different. It's different like yours. And without missing a beat, this little boy grabbed his fingers, grabbed his cheeks. With his fingers and tried to distort his own face to look like mom. And he turned to his mom and said, see, mom, I can do that too. I do. I do. That's such a beautiful lesson. Oh, my God. And I went back to my table. And as the parents were leaving, they kind of looked at me. And I could tell that they were reevaluating how they were sheltering their child from. Right. experience of people who were different. And they both whispered. sorry they didn't bark they just uh so anyway um i realized after hiding so many years that i needed to get out amongst people again so i uh started working on magic again i had done magic since i was five or six and i'd always i always enjoyed performing for families and so forth so um i got good enough so i joined the Magic Castle which is a private club in Hollywood for magicians and their guests And once I passed the audition, I would go, and I had to be in a suit, and I would lurk and kind of watch other magicians. And I saw their interactions with audience members blowing people's minds, and I was like, this is what I want to do. Right. So I got the courage to sit down at one of the impromptu tables and invite audience members to sit at the table. But they did, because they were polite. But they were distracted by my face. And not in a negative way. They were just curious. Did he have a bald knee? Did he have a stroke? Why was his face paralyzed? But that distracted them from enjoying the magic. So I changed my act. And I would welcome them. And I'd say, guys, welcome. My name is John. I've been doing magic since I can remember. But in 2002, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. And when they cut it out of my head, they traumatized my facial nerve. That's the paralyzed face. Something happened to me on that operating room table. I'm not sure what it was because I was unconscious. All I know is I woke up and I realized I had acquired some new skills. Yeah. Pause and wait for the audience to get on the edge of their chairs, Wondering what possible skills I could have acquired by having brain strength. And then I would look to my right and my left like it was the deepest secret. And I would lean in and whisper in a loud voice, I am able to visualize people's thoughts. And then I would do some mentalism or mental magic. And what I ended up doing is two things. One, it answered the questions that everybody had on their mind. Right. I was distracting them but didn't want to ask. Second thing it did, it shared something personal about me so they could connect. Exactly. That's so good. I love that. That is so good. I mean, you took a situation. And you changed it. You knew what was on their mind. That was, like, so good. You knew exactly what was on their minds. Oh, of course. Mm-hmm. Now, you can tell when someone's looking at your eyes, or they're looking at your chin, or your nose, or your forehead, or your cheek. You can sense where their gaze is. This talk about like you hiding for so many years, you know, and I know this is probably that is probably one of your breakout points that you started getting back into the, you know, the arena of being seen in mirrors and all of that great stuff. You know, what were you telling yourself and about yourself when you were covering the mirrors? What were you saying? And the second part is, how did you eventually kind of like start to get back into that? Well, I was, you know, it was, I didn't pose for a photograph because when there was a photograph of me, the flatness of the photograph really accentuates the droopiness of mine. So, um, I didn't want to be in people's photographs because I thought me being in them was ruining the photograph for the other. Ooh. That's really what was deep in my heart. Okay. You know, we hear a lot of people all the time talking about, I am so camera shy. I'm so camera shy. I don't want to be in a film. I don't want to be on going social media and all this great stuff. You know, they always say those things. But for you, it was a different type of, I don't want to go in front of the camera. You know, I don't want to come do that because it was, you know, it was your looks that you were concerned about. And it really wasn't right. It really wasn't. No, it was all in my head. Yeah. People, I made it worse than anyone else did. Yes, yeah. But I learned from that child that, you know, people are curious. Yeah, they're very curious. When you look back at those 12 years, what did staying hidden protect you from in the short term? And then what did it cost you over time? Judgment, you know, people judging me. Right, right, yeah. People thinking that I... was ugly, that I had lost the smile that I liked, that I had before surgery. Right. You know, people look at you when they meet you for the first time, and they key in your eyes first, and then they go right to your smile. And that's how they see whether or not you're someone they want to interact with. Right. You know, if someone's frowning all the time, people avoid you, because they don't want to deal with that. Yeah, exactly. So I had to overcome that fear of being judged for my facial point. I tell a funny story that, you know, I spent 12 years hiding from cameras and mirrors and life in general. And then I got through it by starting to perform magic. Right. And then March of 2020 came. And what happened in March of 2020? The pandemic. Yes, right. Nothing happened. That's what happened. Well, no, but everybody was now forced to wear a face mask. Absolutely, yep. It was not only politically correct, but it was government mandated. Right, exactly. And I had spent 12 years not hiding my face. Now you had to hide it. So I found a site online that was making custom face masks. And I sent them or uploaded a picture of my lower half of my jaw. Right. And they printed it on the mask. And I would wear that mask out in public. Strangers wouldn't understand. They would just dismiss. But people who knew me would do a double take. Yeah. Without me having to say a word, they would understand that John Kippen refuses to hide his face, even through a global pandemic. Yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. You eventually rediscovered your love of magic and began reconnecting with the world. Your journey included a meaningful moment at a magic convention in 2017. Yeah. Can you talk about that with us? I was amongst the greatest minds in magic at this convention, and I wanted to have pictures with these great magicians. But again, I hadn't posed for a photograph. But the desire to have photos of me taken with these great magicians, I just... I threw caution to the wind, handed strangers my phone, and said, do me a favor, take our picture. And I did that 20 or 30 times. And I got home after the convention and uploaded the photos to my computer, and it dawned on me, if these great minds in magic had no trouble taking a picture with me, what was my problem? You know, what I found as I performed magic, and I shared my story, I shared something personal, people stopped worrying about my face. My face would no longer define me because I didn't let it. And then after I would be done performing, people would come up and they'd strike up conversations. And they shared their battles of what they were hiding because they saw my strength of being able to deal with my facial paralysis and enjoy life again. And people with cancer, people, you know, with all sorts of syndromes, paralysis. defect scars and they looked to me for kind of guidance on they wanted some of my secret thoughts and that's what kind of led me to becoming a coach yeah where I help people get out of their own way that's right for all our worst enemies absolutely the worst And that's what I wanted the people to hear, is that sometimes breakthroughs don't always look like this dramatic, you know, play, but it looks like something so simple, like you just said, an event or photograph that changes you totally. And that's, you know, that's a really remarkable thing that you did and how you just turned your life around. I created a coaching method called the I'm Possible Method. It's a play on the word impossible. Breaking it into two sections. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, no, you took, yes. And one of the things that we talk about is a lot of people say, just step out into your comfort zone. Right. I allow my clients to tiptoe out of their comfort zone. That's good. That's good. I like that. So if it feels a little scary, they can immediately tiptoe back in. No harm, no foul. Yes, that's good. But once they tiptoe and they realize, hey, that isn't so hard. Then they continue tiptoeing, and before they know it, they're living their best lives again, you know. They have dealt with those fears, which are normally irrational, but they preoccupy people's minds. Another thing I help my clients do is dream. So many people stop dreaming. You know, they dreamed as a kid. Right. You know, and then they grow up, and they get a job, and build a career and a family. They have that one goal of what they want to accomplish in their life. And it's almost like they put blinders on trying to achieve that goal. Right. And then they get to that goal after 30, 40 years. Right. And they look back and they look at that to-do list and all the boxes are checked. And they wonder why they feel so empty, so unhappy. It's because those blinders kept them from seeing all the other avenues and possibilities. You know, your life is not a straight line. It curves and it goes this way and goes that way. Mm-hmm. People are so focused on that original dream. They get to that rainbow, as you would call it, and it's not as colorful as they thought it might be. Mm-hmm. So I help my clients dream again Given no limitations, what is it that would make you happy? What is it that would bring you joy? And usually it's whatever your passion is. For me, it was magic. Other people, it's music. Other people, it's art or drawing or photography or whatever their passion is, their creative outlet. And I found that if you take your creative outlet and use that in your day-to-day interaction with others, You become alive, you become excited, you become interesting, you become attractive. And not in a physical, sexual way, in an emotional way that gravitates people to you because they want to feel what you're feeling. That's true, that's true. You've spoken about the idea that being different can be a superpower. How did you move from seeing your facial paralysis as something that made you less acceptable to recognizing that it didn't have to define your worth or determine what you could contribute to the world? Happiness is a choice. I chose to not let my facial paralysis get in my way. You know, I always saw opportunities and threw caution to the wind and experimented and tried them. I live my life with a good or bad feeling that it's better to ask for forgiveness and permission. And that's hit me in the butt a couple of times, but it's also given me some of the greatest life experiences I would never have had if I didn't just see an opportunity and grab it. Hmm. What's one part of your life that you would like to reclaim and what is the action that you went towards? A part of my life that I would like to reclaim. Well, that you did reclaim in this whole thing. Oh. This whole journey. You know, the self-love, joy, you know, what's the meaning of life, whether or not you're spiritual or not. It's to fill as many days of your life with joy and happiness. That's great. That's why we're on this earth. That's it. That's really it. That's right. I love that. John, thank you for sharing all of this, this beautiful story and being willing to talk about the years that people may not see when they look at where you are today. Thanks so much for just sharing that story with us and helping the audience just find their way back, you know, because some of them may be in the same place that you're in today. And this is just something so very simple that they can add to your life. Here's my book, Playing the Hand You Were Dealt. You can find it on Amazon. It's a memoir filled with great quotes and great stories. I'm a storyteller, so I've had a lot of amazing experiences in my life. So if something I said inspired you. And you're looking for coaching, by all means, you know, Edna will put my email address in the show notes, [email protected], or wherever, and you can find me on social media, you can Google me, I'm everywhere. Yeah, right, so he's giving you all the information, and all I can say, this is Edna White, and this is Keeping It Real On Purpose, and me and my esteemed guest, John Kippen, is going to say goodbye for now. Thank you.