After brain surgery, Mount’s Flanagan ‘just won’t stop’
At the age of 22, Brendan Flanagan felt as though he were 90.
A day after undergoing surgery in September 2007 to remove a brain tumor, Flanagan tried to walk from his bed to the bathroom at the hospital at New York University. A simple step took unbelievable effort.
“I was so unbalanced that I walked like a 90-year-old man,” recalled Flanagan, who could not lift anything heavier than a 5-pound weight for a month and was barred from physical activity for two months. “I remember the first time I got out of bed, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m an athlete. I’m fine, I’m healthy.’ They [the doctors] said, ‘You can’t walk.’ I tried to go to the bathroom and the first step I took, I went down. I thought I was walking straight, but I was walking at an angle.”
