HARTFORD, Conn. -- Jeremy Goldsmith is a guitarist, and a session musician who has written and produced music for TV shows and programming over the years such as the Tokyo Olympics, Fox NFL Sunday and “ Say Yes to the Dress.”

So when Goldsmith, who lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, started noticing his left hand and arm were not functioning properly in August, he was concerned. It got worse over the span of a month.

“I was severely immobilized,” he said. “Most of my fingers were not working properly.”

In mid-August, it got so bad, Goldsmith decided to go to the emergency room at Greenwich Hospital. They discovered he had a brain tumor in his right parietal lobe which was affecting the motor function of his left side.

Goldsmith was taken by ambulance to Yale New Haven Hospital and was operated on by Dr. Jennifer Moliterno, the chief of neurosurgical oncology and the clinical director of the Chênevert Family Brain Tumor Center.

That was Aug. 18. On Sept. 2, Goldsmith posted a video of himself playing his guitar on Facebook and wrote: “I am currently 13 days postop, and, thanks to the amazing team at #yalenewhavenhospital and the incredible @jennifermoliterno MY FINGERS ARE STILL WORKING.”

Goldsmith said when he woke up from the surgery, he could feel sensation in his left hand again.

“I’m recovering still, because I had balance and coordination issues on my entire left side, but my hand was operable when I woke up,” he said recently. “That’s pretty amazing.

“I’ve slowly been getting back into playing. Now I’m working and it was three months ago.”

Goldsmith, 47, was diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor – an unexpected recurrence of cancer once thought to be in remission. The tumor was near his motor cortex, specifically near the region that coordinates hand movement and strength.

Moliterno was able to remove the tumor completely and preserve Goldsmith’s hand function, crucial to his job.

“The tumor was about in as good a place as it could have been – it was close to my skull in my upper right parietal,” he said. “It wasn’t deep in my brain.”

Before he had surgery, Goldsmith said he was hooked up to an MRI machine and he went through a number of exercises, touching his thumb to his fingers on his left hand for about 10 minutes, with different patterns of doing so.

“The technician came in and made sure during the surgery they were stimulating those neurons so I could get back functional use of my left hand and fingers,” he said.

It was important to Moliterno to be able to preserve his hand function.

“There’s various things we do to make that safe and possible – one of them happens to be surgeon expertise and skill set and training and the volume of what I do for more complex brain tumors, which makes things safer,” she said. “I got the functional MRI, which is a more sophisticated type of MRI which looks at the function of the brain relative to the tumor. Because I do this so much, I knew looking at the basic MRI, that the tumor was concerning for being in his motor area and we confirmed it was in his motor area with the functional MRI.

“With that information, I could come up with a plan. The tumor was just behind the motor area. It was pushing on the motor area. The functional MRI helped confirm that or at least alluded to that. Sometimes I keep patients awake during surgery because it’s safer and I can monitor their strength during surgery but for him, I felt very confident that I could do all of this with him asleep. What I did was my standard surgical approach with a craniotomy then I mapped out the motor area of the surface of his brain, and then understood the relationship of the tumor with that. And that allowed me to successfully remove it and not only maintain his strength but subsequently improve his function.”

It was a two-hour surgery. Goldsmith, who has been playing music professionally since he was 16 years old, was home four days later. He had to undergo radiation and finished that in early October.

He picked up his guitar the day he got home.

“I can’t speak highly enough about my surgeon,” Goldsmith said.

“It’s incredibly satisfying,” Moliterno said. “People like him are faced with these terrible diseases and it’s good to know there are things we can do to help, not only to help with the oncological part of it but also to help with the neurological, functional part of it, and the life component, the quality of life.”

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