Simone Giertz, the YouTube star who calls herself the “queen of shitty robots,” revealed in a vlog posted Friday that her brain tumor has returned.
“Goddammit,” she said in her video. “I really wish this wasn’t a thing. But this tumor is a thing. Even though it’s not what I would have chosen for myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be all bad. What I keep trying to remind myself is this is one of those things that looks like a really bad thing on the outside but I know too little about life to be sure.”
Giertz underwent brain surgery in May, and it went well enough that when she woke up after the procedure, she immediately made a dirty joke. But she said Friday that the surgery didn’t actually remove the entire benign tumor, which she had previously named “Brian the Brain Tumor.”
The reason doctors opted to leave in part of the tumor was that it wasn’t cancerous and was not expected to spread to the rest of her body and because it was too dangerous to extract the entire tumor.
“Brian the Brain Tumor is an unambitious, low-growing, couch-potato of a tumor,” Giertz said. “We knew there was a risk it would grow down the line. Which it has. The line in “down the line’ was a little shorter than I anticipated. It’s only been eight months.”
Giertz said she won’t have to go back to surgery. Instead, she’ll undergo radiation therapy five days a week for six weeks.
Giertz is known for her wacky science experiments and building projects that never seem to work right. As the Daily Dot wrote in 2016, “She’s developed the Eating Breakfast Machine, a robot that’s supposed to pour a bowl of Cheerios and spoon-feed it to her, but instead it spills shit all over the floor. Then there’s the Applause Machine, which is just two plastic hands at the ends of motorized tongs, an idea she came up with after her ‘hands started hurting’ from clapping too much at a conference. Then, there’s my personal favorite, the Wake-Up Machine, a tin box with an attached giant rubber hand that—you guessed it—roundhouses her in the face at 5:30am.”
She said she’d been reluctant to make a new video about her brain tumor, because “I don’t want to be brain tumor girl. I don’t want this to be my thing. I want to be badass builder girl who can build whatever she wants.”
Still, she’s trying to remain positive—and destructive.
“The campaign for 2018 with surgery was ‘Evict Brian,’” she said. “For 2019, we’re moving on to ‘Burn Brian.’”
Here’s her entire video.