Alison Stewart’s health crisis began on Feb. 22, a day jump-started by a 6 a.m. workout with her personal trainer. She was pushing herself to get back in shape after having donated a kidney to her sister six months earlier. The workout was routine, though she barely spoke, which was unlike her.
As the morning progressed, she began to feel confusion; she couldn’t engage in a lucid conversation or write a coherent text message. She headed into SoHo, to WNYC Studios, where she hosts the daily interview show “All of It,” and settled into her office to practice reading an introduction to a segment, but her phrasing hit roadblocks instead of flowing smoothly. Baffled, she sought out Kate Hinds, the show’s director.
Ms. Hinds was taken aback. “She looked very upset, her skin a little gray,” she recalled. “The disintegration was so stark and alarming. I was terrified.” She urged her to see a doctor.
Ms. Stewart’s doctor listened to her garbled words over the phone and told her to go straight to the emergency room. There, she was able to execute commands like touching her nose and walking backward and forward, signaling that she probably had not suffered a stroke, but a CT scan revealed a mass on her brain.
Ms. Stewart, 58, was soon talking gibberish, a dreadful and mystifying development for a woman who made her living by talking. Her decline was so rapid that her colleagues wondered whether she would ever be on the radio again.
“I knew she was trapped in there,” said Tracy Christian, one of several friends who had rushed to her side.
Awake Brain Surgery
The next day, Dr. Randy D’Amico, a brain-tumor specialist at Northwell’s Lenox Hill Hospital, came in to discuss the findings of an MRI. “The shape of the mass looked funny,” he recalled. “We weren’t sure if it was a brain tumor or not.” He did know that it was in a dangerous place: Broca’s area in the left hemisphere, her speech center.
Since 2022, Dr. D’Amico, 43, has been at the forefront of introducing to New York City a novel software program produced by Quicktome, which precisely maps a patient’s brain networks before surgery. He cuts an unusual figure, with tattoos snaking out from his scrubs. But he was also a calming and commanding presence. He explained to Ms. Stewart what was at risk and why he wanted her to be awake during surgery. It was important that he be able to test her speech in real time, he said; he didn’t want to probe too deeply and disconnect a vital region that controlled verbal or motor function.
Ms. Stewart agreed without hesitation. She had kept up a stoic, clinical front since her symptoms emerged; each consultation was another problem to be solved. But when she saw her teenage son, Isaac, just before the operation, she nearly fell apart. She managed to say, “Goodbye, I’ll see you on the other side.”
What that meant, no one knew.
Language had always been Ms. Stewart’s lifeblood. As an undergraduate at Brown University, she concentrated on English and American literature. She has written two books and channeled her love of reading through “Get Lit,” a monthly book club she hosts with the New York Public Library that features interviews with authors like Mona Simpson and Michael Cunningham. She spent decades in the news business with on-air positions at CBS, ABC, MSNBC, PBS and NPR. In 2018, she became the host of “All of It” on WNYC, having conversations each weekday from noon to 2 p.m. with a parade of actors, directors, artists, composers, chefs, writers, curators, musicians and comedians.
In the 1990s, she was a political correspondent for MTV News, a stint that turned out to resonate with Dr. D’Amico, who had watched the network religiously as a teenager and played bass in Brooklyn punk bands before giving up music for medical school. In the operating theater he enthusiastically complied with Ms. Stewart’s playlist request. He performed brain surgery to a ’90s soundtrack of Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots.
Ms. Stewart was given anesthesia for the 30 minutes it took for her skull to be cut and her brain exposed. Upon awakening, all she felt was a coldness. She was the interview subject this time, answering questions while three and a half centimeters of whitish-yellow material was removed from her brain’s left hemisphere. Her responses helped guide Dr. D’Amico, who listened keenly for any signs of deterioration. Given the procedure’s complexity and the high stakes for Ms. Stewart, Dr. D’Amico invited Dr. John Boockvar, head of the brain tumor program at Lenox Hill, to assist him.
Emerging from the three-hour surgery, Ms. Stewart could not speak at all. This was expected, and Dr. D’Amico was not concerned. He told her that her brain would need some time to heal. It was a relief to learn that the mass was an abscess caused by actinomycosis bacteria and a staph infection, not cancer. But in the recovery room, Ms. Stewart was filled with fury upon finding herself mute.
Talking Through a Dented Pipe
As Dr. D’Amico predicted, words began to reappear after a few days. Ms. Stewart could say her name and her speech pathologist’s name, but she could not think of a single vegetable. Sentences and paragraphs took a lot longer. In acute rehab, she would be drilled for weeks in speech, occupational and physical therapy. She spent months in her Chelsea apartment, working to overcome weakness on her right side and wondering if she would ever be able to play piano again, a pursuit that gave her joy. She also thought she might have to come up with another career.
During this time, her director, Ms. Hinds, was fielding concerned and sometimes angry calls from listeners about the host’s cryptic absence. “As if I had her handcuffed in a basement,” she said. Her small production team kept the show going with guest hosts and has so far been untouched by the budget cuts and recent layoffs at New York Public Radio.
Over the summer, Ms. Stewart began to feel ready to return to “All of It” on a part-time basis, taping segments beforehand. The first one that aired was a conversation with Dr. D’Amico, who helped explain her diagnosis and surgery to listeners. During the 36-minute episode, he pointed out how rare it was to encounter such a previously healthy person with this condition. “You threw us for a loop,” he told her.
These days, she is back to doing five shows a week, all live. “Making mistakes used to scare me, and now I know I just have to keep going,” she said.
But none of it comes easy. Words still don’t always look right on her phone, so she’ll stare at the screen, double-checking spellings. Ad-libbing and correctly pronouncing unusual names are ongoing challenges. She needs a script for interviews instead of winging it like before. What she once did automatically now feels like hard labor. “Like dragging a bucket of cement,” she said.
Even her gait has become more cautious, and she doesn’t dare jaywalk anymore, too unsure if the green light is for her or for the oncoming traffic. In the middle of the street she can suddenly feel lost, so she waits on the curb. “Me and the tourists,” she said cheerfully.
“There are days I wake up and have gone backwards,” she said. “I’ll have a sophisticated thought, but it’s going through a pipe that’s dented. Sometimes it gets caught, and I’m banging out the dents.” These bottlenecks are no more obvious than the eight-inch, question-mark-shaped scar circling her skull, buried under an abundance of brown curls. The surgeon had reassured Ms. Stewart about his knife skills, telling her, “You have good hair; I’m going to leave it alone.”
‘A Solid B-Minus’
She returned to “Get Lit” at the end of September, interviewing Erik Larson at the New York Public Library about his book “The Demon of Unrest.” The event sold out, with hundreds of spectators filling the seats and thousands more streaming it online.
“What I didn’t want to happen happened,” Ms. Stewart said ruefully. Early in the program, she mixed up some words and got off track despite her heavy preparation. “I’d give myself a solid B-minus.”
Audience members later thanked her for her honesty about her brain issue, though one woman made a point to tell her, “For your first time back, that was great.” Ms. Stewart laughed and said: “She was right. I know I’m going to come back better next time.”
As for her prognosis, a recent brain scan showed scar tissue and a tiny hole that Dr. D’Amico said appeared to be closing. No infection is apparent anymore, but she must stay on antibiotics for now. What caused the infection in the first place remains a mystery.
Amid Ms. Stewart’s dogged focus on returning to the high professionalism she had established on her show, she approached her love of playing the piano with a different kind of determination: to do something for pure pleasure, with no goal involved. But could she read the notes? Would her fingers know what to do?
“She was fragile when she first came in,” Rosemary Caviglia, her longtime piano teacher, said. “She very slowly went up the scale in the right fingering pattern. When she got to the top, tears were streaming down her cheeks, her mind making that connection was so profound. Now she’s playing Bach.”
Ms. Stewart is more modest about her virtuosity, knowing it will take a long time to get back to where she was. But when she’s playing, she said, she can forget everything else, get lost in a good way.
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