For Patients & Families
If your surgery went well but you don’t feel like yourself — you’re not imagining it.
Brain surgery changes people in ways that don’t always show up on scans. Your MRI may look perfect. Your neurological exam may be normal. And you may still feel like a different person — more tired than you’ve ever been, emotionally unpredictable, struggling to do things that used to be easy, grieving parts of yourself that seem to have gone missing.
This is not in your head. It is not weakness. It is not depression (though it can look like it). It is a real, documented pattern that happens to people after brain surgery — and until now, medicine hasn’t had a good way to measure it.
What the PCRES Measures
The PCRES (Post-Craniotomy Recovery Experience Scale) was built by a neurosurgeon who saw this pattern in his own patients. It asks the questions that standard medical tools don’t:
What to Expect During Recovery
Every person’s recovery is different, but research shows that many post-craniotomy patients experience some combination of:
- •Neurofatigue — a type of exhaustion that is neurological in origin, disproportionate to activity, and resistant to rest. It is not laziness and it is not the same as being tired.
- •Cognitive changes — difficulty with multitasking, word-finding, following conversations, or making decisions under pressure. These may not show up on formal testing in a quiet room.
- •Emotional shifts — crying more easily, feeling irritable or flat, reacting differently than you used to. These are often neurological, not psychological.
- •A sense of loss — grief for the person you were before surgery, for abilities that changed, or for the life you expected to return to.
- •A disconnect — feeling like your medical team thinks everything went great while you are quietly struggling. This is the medical-experience gap, and it is one of the most common and least-discussed aspects of recovery.
None of these experiences mean your surgery failed. They mean you are a human being recovering from brain surgery, and recovery involves more than what shows up on a scan.
How the PCRES Helps
The PCRES gives your medical team a way to see what you’re actually experiencing. Instead of asking “Are you depressed?” (which often misses the point), it asks about the specific dimensions of recovery that matter to you. When your clinician reviews your results, they get a clear picture of which areas need attention — and what kind of support might help.
The assessment takes 5–8 minutes and can be completed on your phone or on paper. It is completely free and your responses are scored in your browser — nothing is stored on any server.
Still You: A Book for Your Recovery
Still You: Emotional Recovery After Brain Surgery was written for you. It covers what no one tells you about recovery — the identity questions, the fatigue, the grief, the gap between what medicine sees and what you feel. It is free to download.
You Are Part of This
The PCRES is being validated right now. Every patient who completes the assessment helps build the evidence that emotional recovery matters — and helps future patients get the support they deserve.