Illustration by Débora Islas
The Fiesta ware plate crashed to pieces on the floor. Alone in her house one afternoon in November 2021, Brooke Barganier shooed away her sweet Labrador retriever, Allie, and then slumped to the floor as well.
In her 43 years, Barganier had survived 23 surgeries, endured more radiation treatments than she could count, and watched helplessly as the tumors growing inside her head deformed her face and the steroids she took to fight them changed her body. She lost vision in her right eye at age 14 but had persevered to become a pediatric nurse and a devoted wife, daughter, and friend.
She’d made it this far. But complete blindness? That would require a whole new level of trust, the South Lebanon resident thought as she lay sobbing on the floor. Trust in her doctors. Trust in her God. Trust in her purpose.
She lay there for maybe an hour, mourning the loss of sight in her quiet house, her husband John at work. Finally, she decided not to remain on the floor. “I got up,” says Barganier, “and figured out how to gather up all the pieces of the plate.”
Barganier had been the kind of kid who stuffed socks in her shoes to be tall enough to ride roller coasters at Kings Island. Outgoing, she never met a stranger, says her mother, Debby Schaefer. “This would never happen nowadays,” her mother says, “but we were flying to Florida and she was 10 months old, just so happy and bubbly. She got passed around the plane.”
Until 10, she was living a “normal” childhood, attending Lakota Local Schools in West Chester Township. Then headaches started keeping her from soccer practice and sleepovers. Her right eye slowly started to protrude.
Alarmed, her parents took her to an ophthalmologist, a doctor who diagnoses and treats eye and vision conditions. He referred them to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and so began a lifelong queue of doctor’s appointments and medical procedures.
By 15, Barganier was diagnosed with complex meningioma, non-cancerous tumors that grow on membranous layers that line the brain. These tumors are rather common and typically grow slowly. Many don’t ever require medical intervention. Barganier, on the other hand, had an aggressive case.
“At school they called me Frogeye,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie. It was hard in high school to be left out of certain things with friends, because they were embarrassed of how I looked.”
Barganier says she might not have made it through without her parents, who were always building up her confidence, and a steadfast group of friends in her youth group at Faith Bible Church in Sharonville. They, like her parents, didn’t treat her differently as her condition worsened.
By senior prom, Barganier had been through craniofacial surgery and an orbital decompression and was undergoing radiation treatments to try to shrink and slow down the growth of the tumors. No one had asked her to the dance, so she wasn’t going. But she offered to do a friend’s hair and sat, weaving an updo and listening, as a friend complained about a tiff she was having with her date.
Before the cameras could flash and corsages could be pinned, Barganier drove home. She stormed to her bedroom. Her father followed. “What’s wrong?” Dale Schaefer asked.
“Everything,” said 17-year-old Brooke. Her hair had fallen out. Radiation caused constant vomiting. These tumors might kill her. Her friend’s problem was so small. So petty.
Barganier remembers her father hugged her and was quiet for a while, before saying something that would stick with her and begin to mold her outlook on life. “He said, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to learn something. Right now, your friend fighting with her boyfriend IS the biggest problem in her life. What you deal with will be on a larger scale, but you’re going to be a very bitter woman if you don’t figure out how to understand that.”
Brooke Barganier, now 45, jokes that in heaven God will remake her in the image of Cindy Crawford. Humor has always been a tool, she says, to help put people around her at ease and help her cope with the stares and averted eyes.
Through the years, she’s built a resolve that whatever is going on in her life medically and however she looks is just temporary. She wholeheartedly believes that God gave her this life—these burdens—for a reason.
One part, she thinks, was so she’d become a nurse. Early on in her medical journey, Barganier decided to make it her profession. One particular experience sealed the deal.
She was 14 and recovering from craniofacial surgery in Michigan, which required laying completely flat after the procedure, as fluid drained from her brain. “It was about 10 p.m. and I was having a terrible night,” she remembers. “I called my parents at their hotel and said, You have to come back.”
They told Barganier they couldn’t. They were exhausted and had to rest. Word of her struggles traveled to a nurse who’d come in for a shift but wasn’t needed. Instead of going home, the nurse sat, off the clock, and read to Brooke until she was ready to sleep. “As a nurse, you’re interacting with people at their most vulnerable moments in life,” she says. “And you have this ability to be able to make it better just by being there.”
Barganier graduated from the second to last class of the combined Lakota High School and attended Ohio State University for a year before moving back home, where she finished an associate’s degree in nursing and science at Raymond Walters College (now UC Blue Ash). She passed the National Council Licensure Examination and became a registered nurse in 2000.
Her first job was at Jewish Hospital in the bone marrow transplant unit, and then she worked at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in the neurosurgery unit before transferring to oncology, where she helped treat children suffering from cancer. Today Barganier serves in the same-day surgery unit at Children’s Liberty Campus. She helps prepare kids and their caretakers for all sorts of procedures—from sports-related anterior cruciate ligament injuries to ear tube insertions—that don’t require an overnight stay afterward. She helps them prep for surgery and get safely home with the medications and information they need.
Her personal health journey allows Barganier to be compassionate with patients and their parents, says Ann Niehaus, who’s worked alongside her for 11 years. She is amazed how quickly Barganier can dial in on a child’s interests and bring comfort to his or her caretakers. “She knows all of the kids’ favorite toys and shows,” Niehaus says. “She talks sports with the older kids, manicures and pedicures with the teenaged girls.”
Connecting with her patients has always come easily, Barganier says, but other parts of becoming a nurse weren’t. “In nursing school, I could not get the depth of the needle to the vial,” she says. “I asked my professor if I could have a vial and a syringe to take home, just for the night. I stuck myself a bunch of times.”
But she practiced and learned her own way. In her 20s, though her face was minorly distorted, Barganier’s blind eye still looked normal. Her instructor had no idea she was blind when she asked to take home the simple medical equipment. “A lot of people were like, How are you going to put in an IV?” she says. But she got it.
When Barganier isn’t feeling great or is preparing for a big procedure of her own, she might get a little quieter, a little more serious, Niehaus says, but not by much. “And she never complains. She considers work a privilege.”
Another colleague and friend, Sandra Sayers, says she’s constantly inspired by Barganier’s bravery in the face of the unknown. “She is more stressed out by a messy toy closet than brain surgery,” says Sayers, who wasn’t surprised when Barganier was awarded the hospital’s Patient and Family All-Star Award in 2021 for the amount of positive feedback she received in surveys. “When she came in to receive this award, she was actually on medical leave,” Sayers says.
Barganier’s face was swollen more than usual. Even under masks because of COVID, everyone could see. “Everything is out of her hands, you know, but she comes in and she says, I’m bringing sexy back,” Sayers says, laughing. It’s so Brooke, serving up levity and humor.
As her sight diminished, Barganier reluctantly took a medical leave from work. She didn’t know if she’d be able to return.
It would be easy for Barganier to play the victim, says her friend of almost 40 years, Reba George Dysart. If anything, she downplays her troubles. “She has faith it’s all part of something bigger,” Dysart says.
The two met at Faith Bible Church, where they participated in a youth group and went on mission trips. They danced nights away at clubs around Ohio State University their freshman year. Dysart later counted on Barganier to lend a hand when she had “Irish triplets”—her first child and then, less than a year later, twins.
Barganier was there when Dysart’s parents died in quick succession from cancer and stuck by her through her divorce. “There are many people who come and go through the seasons of your life,” Dysart says. “Not Brooke.”
Their shared faith is a big part of their connection, Dysart says, but she also loves Barganier for being a riot on road trips and inspiring her with an effervescent can-do attitude.
Barganier has bad days, but she stays focused on her belief that God has a plan— even if she can’t see it. It’s been hard to accept her path sometimes, she says. She and her husband decided not to have children—a really tough one—because her condition made it dangerous for both Barganier and any child she would carry. There was one miscarriage.
If they were being honest, they didn’t know how long Barganier would be around. That seemed unfair to a child.
About eight years ago, doctors decided it would be best to close her right eye permanently to avoid infection. Until then, despite not working, the eye had looked normal. Barganier found herself again wrestling with her outward appearance.
“I had a really hard time with it,” she says. “I’d look in the mirror and almost be like, Who is that? But then I had to say, You’re not 13, get over yourself!”
One of the greatest influences in her life was another best friend, Leah Kirk. “She said, Maybe that’s God’s way of sharing your hope and faith with other people,” Brooke says. “She said people were going to look at me but I could use that to get their attention.”
Six months after the procedure on Barganier’s right eye, Kirk died of breast cancer.
Again, life had its way of putting things in perspective. Barganier was alive. She could continue choosing hope and joy over defeat and anger. Even if she was going blind, she could be grateful for this life and her place in it.
As Barganier’s vision dwindled, imaging of her head showed a tumor had grown to the size of a fist and was impinging on the optic nerve of her left eye. She and her father made an appointment to see Karl Golnik, M.D., her longtime neuro-ophthalmologist at Cincinnati Eye Institute.
Barganier had been seen and operated on by some of the top medical specialists in the region and traveled to hospitals in Detroit and Houston for some of her procedures. Her case is referenced in medical journals and has been presented at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh, and other medical institutions.
Here in Cincinnati, she’s undergone several craniotomies, removal of part of the skull to treat the tumors, and multiple Gamma Knife radiosurgeries, where nearly 200 beams of radiation target tumor cells. Her care has been coordinated since she was 18 by neurosurgeon Ronald Warnick, M.D., at Mayfield Brain & Spine in West Chester. Barganier considers him family. “Her team of doctors has been following her for 25 or 30 years, but it seemed like the writing was on the wall,” says Golnik, who recently retired from practice. “One doctor told her it was time to learn Braille.”
Barganier’s father noted that her left eye was really bulging, and something clicked for Golnik. With a totally different medical condition called thyroid eye disease, the eye muscles and fatty tissue behind the eye can become inflamed and cause the eye to bulge. In rare cases, it can cause blindness, but surgeons can go in and remove bone, essentially deepening the eye socket, to allow for more space for the tissue and the optic nerve. Could something like that work?
It just might, thought Mayfield neurosurgeon and brain tumor specialist Vincent DiNapoli, M.D. Together with Jeff Nerad, M.D., an ophthalmic surgeon at Cincinnati Eye Institute, and Philip Theodosopoulos, M.D., then-director of skull base surgery at the University of Cincinnati, the doctors designed a surgery just for Barganier.
“Skull base surgery is a dangerous business, for sure, because we’re operating around arteries that supply the brainstem and the critical parts in the brain that allow us to be awake and to function,” says DiNapoli. Return of her sight “was a bit of a long shot.”
As with many of Barganier’s procedures, there was a slight chance of death. She and her husband prayed and decided to proceed.
After Barganier woke up from the four-plus-hour surgery, she still couldn’t see, but that was expected. If the procedure had worked, her vision would return eventually after things healed up and the inflammation receded.
The day Barganier dropped her piece of Fiesta ware was six weeks after surgery. She couldn’t help but think it hadn’t worked.
At difficult times like these, Barganier pulls out a journal she keeps, where she logs occurrences she considers miracles and blessings. It reminds her to have faith.
Across pages of entries, she chronicles events like the time a check arrived in the mail for her father from a church friend while medical bills piled up during her high school years. The friend knew the church community was praying for Barganier and her family and said he heard a calling to sell stock and give the money to the Schaefers. He didn’t know how much the family needed, but it was just enough to get them through that month.
Barganier was also a recipient of the Special Wish Foundation, which paid for one year of college as well as room and board at Ohio State University, allowing her to have a taste of the college experience (which her family couldn’t afford) with her best friend, Dysart.
And there was the time Barganier’s mother got the urge to pray that a tumor would “just fall off” during a procedure. The family asked their prayer team to do the same, and Theodosopoulos reported back that, after one slice, the tumor fell away and they were able to cut it up and remove it— something he’d never seen before.
One her first date with John, Barganier joked that a life with her would never be boring. Earlier that day—out of the blue— she had called and said she was in Mobile, Alabama, where he lived.
The two had met eight months earlier in an AOL Christian chat room and had been routinely talking on the phone. Surprise! She was in town from Ohio! Not boring at all, John thought.
“I had dated other women, but I hadn’t found one I wanted,” says John. “I wasn’t going to just marry anybody.” After Brooke returned to Lebanon, he realized he missed her and valued their time together. It wasn’t long before Brooke called and asked him to find her an apartment near him. “I don’t know what happened up here,” John says, meaning Ohio, “but, excuse my French, I think all hell broke loose.”
Brooke told her parents that she had met a man from Alabama who was a little older and she was going to move there so they could date. Dad heard “chat room” and got worried. Both parents traveled with her to help her move into her new place and to size up John. Dale Schaefer can say for certain, 20 years later, John was a miracle in and of himself—the husband for his daughter he’d prayed for.
Brooke told John her medical condition would dog them for life. John said it was a part of her, and he loved all of her. They would take it as it came.
On a morning in December 2021, about three months after the surgery to restore sight in her left eye, Barganier woke up and made her way to the bathroom. To her astonishment, she could see the outline of her face in the mirror. Blurry, but there.
In the days that followed, she started seeing small flashes of light. Within weeks, her left eye was back to 20/20 vision. She was finally able to return to work. That one definitely went into the miracle journal.
There’s no way of knowing how long Barganier will keep her sight, says DiNapoli. Her life expectancy is also hard to pinpoint, because it depends on how her tumors grow. But her dad thinks that not knowing if tomorrow is coming encourages one to enjoy life more. His daughter has shown him that since she was 14 preparing for her first surgery. People who know Dale and his family ask, “How is Brooke?” He answers, “Today is a good day” because she’s still here.
Her youth pastor, Keith Missel, stayed in touch with Barganier when he and his wife moved to Iowa to lead another church and then became missionaries abroad. “In pastoral ministry you don’t play favorites, but people stand out,” says Missel. “Brooke has experienced God’s presence and his power. In her brokenness, she has kept giving, like Christ.”
After all she’s been through and expects to go through, Barganier says she wouldn’t change a thing. “I mean, I could have skipped the throwing up for three days straight after brain surgery,” she says, always joking. “But, in the big scheme of things, I wouldn’t be who I am without it.”
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