For months, comedy writer Jeannie Gaffigan brushed off her recurring headaches, dizziness and coughing fits, blaming the symptoms as byproducts of life as a working mom of five. It wasn’t until she began to lose her hearing, however, that Jeannie – the wife of comedian and actor Jim Gaffigan – decided to push for answers, ultimately learning the unimaginable: she had a tumor the size of an apple wrapped around her brain stem. “I was a ticking time bomb, waiting to be paralyzed,” Jeannie, 47, says in this week’s issue of PEOPLE. It was a benign papilloma of the choroid plexus that had likely been growing for over a year, says her surgeon, Dr. Joshua Bederson, Professor and System Chair Department of Neurosurgery at The Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. “All function of the brain passes through the brain stem and out into the body,” Bederson explains. “And her brain stem was compressed.” For more from Jim … [Read more...] about Jim Gaffigan’s Wife Jeannie on Discovering She Had a Brain Tumor the Size of an Apple: ‘I Was a Ticking Time Bomb’