Gary Woodland Details Fearing for His Life Leading Up to Brain Surgery
Gary Woodland said he feared for his life as he dealt with issues associated with a lesion on his brain that led to surgery four months ago.
The 2019 U.S. Open champion who has four PGA Tour victories is returning to competition for the first time this week at the Sony Open following September surgery to partially remove a tumor on the left side of his brain.
Speaking openly about the symptoms, the testing and the fears associated with his ordeal at a news conference in Honolulu at Waialae Country Club, Woodland, 39, explained that he had a craniotomy "so they cut me open all the way down to my ear ... so I’ve got a robotic head, I guess."
Gary Woodland's last PGA Tour start was in August.
Vincent Carchietta/USA TODAY Sports
"It came out of nowhere," Woodland said of symptoms that began a few weeks after the Masters. "It was a horrible experience. All you wanted to do was go to sleep to not think about it, and going to sleep was the worst part. That is where all the seizures were happening. It was a horrible four, five months."
Woodland said he began to experience a jolting feeling that would wake him up in the night with tremors and shaking hands.
"A lot of fear," he said. "That was the one that scared me the most, was I’m a very optimistic person. I believe good things will happen. I was very fear-driving, every day, mostly around death.
"As it got worse, loss of appetite, chills, no energy. It started getting pretty bad to where I was meeting—I have a performance coach, I'm working with her. It started getting so bad I called my doctor who I've been with for 13 years and I was like, man, I need something to calm me down. Almost anxiety.
“And he's like, 'G-Dub, I can't give you anything without an MRI.' I'm shaking so bad. He wanted to rule out Parkinson's. I got an MRI that night and came back with a lesion. Looked like a tumor on my brain. Started going through more testing, more MRIs, and they got me to a specialist in Kansas City who explained everything to a T.
"The jolting and everything I was experiencing at night was partial seizures. The lesion in my brain sat on the part of my brain that controls fear and anxiety. He's like, 'you're not going crazy. Everything you're experiencing is common and normal for where this thing is sitting in your brain.'"
Woodland said medication was able to control the seizures and he kept playing golf, sometimes quite well. He missed the cut at the PGA Championship but was pleased with his game and played through the Wyndham Championship in August, his last event.
"The fear went away for a couple weeks and once it came back and I was calling the doctors, they were tracking the brain with monthly MRIs to make sure it was stable and not growing," he said. "When the fear started to come back the doctor is like, we have to go in. The part it's pushing on in the brain they believe it was growing.
“I played through Greensboro and the game, the reason I kept playing is my game from a physical standpoint felt really good. I was in positions that I've been trying to get into a long time. It was a break from what I was dealing with off the course.
"It was hard because we didn't tell anybody. It was just we didn't understand either. We didn't know exactly what was going on. My wife (Gabby) was flying out most weekends because I didn't want to be alone. Sleeping was the worst part because I was jolting, jumping out of bed with fear, mostly like I said around death.
"My caddie pulled me aside, 'you can't play this way. You got to go get help. You got to get fixed.' I would be standing over a club and forget which club I'm hitting. I would be lining up putts and think, 'this is taking too long. I'm just going to hit it.' Didn't have the focus or the energy."
It was finally determined that Woodland needed surgery, that the medicine was not going to alleviate his fear. A biopsy was determined to be too risky where it was in the brain so “surgery and removal was the next step. They couldn’t get it all out from where it was located. It was benign. If it was cancerous they would have removed it all. It’s up against my optic tract."
Woodland said he wasn’t sure if he was going to return this week until spending the last 10 days in Hawaii as he tried to determine if he was good enough to go. He made several calls to his instructor, Butch Harmon, and started to get more confidence in his ability to play.
"This week will be a big week," Woodland said. “I can hit every golf shot I want right now physically. It's can my brain sustain the seven days of tournament golf? It's different playing with my buddies back at home at Pine Tree and coming out here and playing against the guys on Tour. Obviously a whole 'nother animal.
"Can I get back to the focus and stuff I'm used to since I've been on Tour? If it's not this week, can I adjust and go home and practice and work on that focus stuff? Obviously I'm in the major championships. I'm not in the signature designated events, so need some help getting in those.
"I plan on being competitive very quickly. Like I said, physically I can hit any shot I want. That's not going to be the problem. I am looking forward to being back and where I'm at and expecting to be ready very soon."