Even before hitting high school, Kaitlyn O’Connor battled with recurring cysts in her right ear and brain. Throughout the early 2000s, she went through numerous surgeries in hopes of fighting back against cholesteatoma. During that time, O’Connor lost her ability to hear out of her right ear. Shaken by her ongoing battle with the cysts, O’Connor found peace when listening to Taylor Swift. Thanks to the singer, the woman explained how she was able to stay positive during the darkest of times.
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Looking back on her years of fighting, O’Connor recalled a moment in 2014 when her cysts grew too large. “When I was in law school in 2014, I went back to an ENT (an ear, nose, and throat doctor), and, at that point, in the office, they could see this growth was back, and it was much larger and the size of a ping-pong ball (and) had wrapped around my jugular nerve, penetrated the outer layer of the brain, and so, right away, I had to get that removed.”
Taylor Swift Offered Kaitlyn O’Connor An Escape
Needing several MRIs, O’Connor remembered how long the process can take and thankfully, she had Swift to help calm her down. “Listening to Taylor really truly just helped me calm down and really just focus on music and not all the noise going on around me, and not even the test itself, but just the fact that the test was going to show that I needed another surgery. Every time I went into one, I was very nervous and just having that brief moment — 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, whatever — to just listen to Taylor and forget about why I was there always just made it a little less traumatizing.”
Revealing the extent of her cysts, Dr. Rick Nelson noted the surgery he performed back in 2021. Watching the cysts get worse over time, the doctor said the issue went “in the back of the ear, behind the ear, down in the base of the skull and it was eroding the plate that separates the ear from the plate, and so, basically, it was on the lining of the brain and down into the neck.”
Although fighting for years, Dr. Nelson eventually offered O’Connor some amazing news as the cysts stopped coming back. “It’s a relief for everyone because she’s had multiple revisions because it keeps coming back, and so, I think that at this point now, that it’s two years out, we can be pretty sure that it’s gone.”
(David Fisher/Shutterstock)
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