Christina Costa

When I was a middle school science teacher, I would often ask my students to kiss their brain.

I got this idea from visiting my friend's kindergarten classroom.

She would ask her students to kiss their brain, and they would take their fingers, tap them to their mouth, and then to the top of their head, and it truly was as cute as you can picture it to be.

So I decided to bring it back to my middle school classroom, which could have gone one of two ways.

But it ended up being a really fun ritual for us too.

And I would ask them to kiss their brain for all the work they did in class as a practice of gratitude.

After teaching middle school, I came back to grad school to get my PhD in psychology.

My research is within the area of positive psychology, which is a science that investigates the strengths and factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive.

I also get to teach psychology to undergrad students and high school students.

I love teaching psych, and my absolute favorite unit to teach in intro psych is the brain.

But while I love teaching about the brain, I thought it would be pushing it to ask my undergrads, aka adults, to kiss their brains, so three years would go by before I would remember that fun phrase.

One day after teaching last year, I had a terrible migraine that left half of my face numb and blurred my vision.

The migraines kept happening, I saw multiple doctors, and then I started experiencing dizzy spells.

The neurologist ordered an MRI, and I remember being so excited because then I would be able to use my own brain pictures when I taught brain imaging to my students.

But as it turns out, my MRI wasn't too picture perfect.

The doctor called me and asked me to go to the ER because there was a large mass in the right hemisphere of my brain.

I have never been more scared in my life than I was that night, and with tears dripping down my face in the hospital, I kissed my brain for the first time since I had left my middle school classroom.

I made it my mantra, and I kissed my brain every single day leading up to and after surgery.

Then, two weeks later, after surgery, the pathology reports came back and I was diagnosed with an anaplastic astrocytoma.

The weeks following were very difficult.