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Simone Giertz didn’t let brain surgery stop her. What’s next?

The “Queen of Sh***y Robots” won’t be stopped.

In the six months since the YouTube star and inventor had a large brain tumor that could have left her paralyzed, blind, or a completely different person removed, Simone Giertz moved her workshop out of her house, jumped back into vlogging for her nearly 1.4 million subscribers, gave a TED talk, and kickstarted an electronic calendar — all while rocking a silvery “supervillain scar” that runs down her scalp, flirting with her hairline.

“If I can’t even take off time when I’ve had fucking brain surgery,” Giertz says over a Skype call from her new, larger workshop in San Francisco. “When am I going to feel that it’s OK to take time off?”

Although she’s constantly on the move now, she still finds a slice of time every day for herself. Her desire to focus on self-care was planted before she even knew about the brain tumor (which she affectionately nicknamed Brian), but since her diagnosis, prioritizing her mental health has been a necessity.

Every morning, she checks in with herself. Brushed teeth? Check. Ate breakfast? Check. Meditated? Check. When she completes her yoga and meditation routine, centering herself for the day, she taps a dime-sized hexagon with the date on it on the “Every Day” calendar she’s created. It lights up with warm encouragement, like a gold star sticker you’d get in grade school.

“We’re adults now, so we get stars if we give them to ourselves,” she tells me when I make the comparison.

The calendar, which she plans to mass produce through a Kickstarter launching this week, was the focus of her time and energy before she even knew she had a brain tumor. On the verge of burning out from her own ambition last year, Giertz realized she needed to spend more time with herself. Determined not to make yet another New Year’s resolution that she wouldn’t stick with, Giertz decided to set a goal for herself: 10 minutes of meditation and 10 minutes of yoga every day. For each day she completes a meditation and yoga session, one of the 365 hexagons lights up, giving her a sense of tangible affirmation for maintaining a healthy habit.

“A lot of people make the mistake of setting the bar too high,” she says, pointing out how easy it is to go to the gym for two hours on the first day, skip the second, and then stop going completely because you’ve given up “and it’s already summer.” To build a routine, she reasons, “you have to make sure that you set the bar low enough that it’s something you can do on even the most chaotic of days.”

She made the announcement in April.

In a video simply titled, “I have a brain tumor,” Giertz darkly joked, “I just want to warn you, things are going to get pretty ugly. Not because I’m gonna show you scans of a gnarly looking tumor, but because I’m an ugly crier.”

At 27 years old, she had been diagnosed with a grade 1 meningioma, a rare, non-cancerous brain tumor the size of a golf ball. A neurologist guessed that it had been growing beneath her skull for the past 10 to 15 years, but she hadn’t noticed it because she didn’t have typical tumor symptoms; the area above her right eye was slightly swollen, but she brushed it off as “just allergies.” Giertz had never experienced the hearing loss, headaches, or seizures that usually manifest with tumors. She eventually acquiesced to an MRI when she began feeling pain in her right eye and the surrounding eye socket.

“If I have physical symptoms, I’m always like, I have cancer or I’m pregnant,” Giertz says, laughing over the Skype call. Although she had “never really been sick before,” she still jumped to worst-case scenarios even before she was diagnosed. “Those are the two places your brain goes, and then you’re always like, no that never happens.”

A self-proclaimed “hobby hypochondriac,” she was convinced that she was just freaking herself out. But when the MRI technician brought her out of the machine to administer an injection of fluid to improve the image clarity, she asked how long Giertz had experienced her symptoms. Giertz felt everything stop.

“She just had this look, and the inflection of her voice and everything … I was like, fuck, they actually found something,” she remembers.

Giertz and the friend she brought for company piled into a taxi and rushed to a hospital with an emergency room 20 minutes away. Calling it “one of the most uncomfortable rides for the driver,” she spent the trip sobbing, oscillating between regretting that she didn’t have kids yet and joking that she could “at least get a book deal out of this.”

“I’ve, in so many ways, done way more than I ever expected out of life,” Giertz explains. “But that was the one thing that was like, I would really, really want to have kids. Just so you make sure people could come to your funeral!”

Giertz is an unrelentingly humorous person. Even when faced with the reality of extensive brain surgery, she joked about alarming total strangers. Once the neurologist determined that she “wasn’t dying, at least that night,” she took home a “whole bundle” of scans of her brain because the hospital accidentally printed too many.

“The ER doctor was just like, “Why … Are you sure that you want that?” she quips, scrunching up her face in imitated disgust. “And he was like ‘… Just don’t show them to your family because it looks really bad.”

Admitting that she “just kept sending them to people,” Giertz at the time wanted to make something from the stark image of the tumor nesting in her brain. (She hasn’t, yet, but still plans to do something.) Whether a massive art installation or a robot that kind of works, the inventor and YouTuber is always thinking of the next thing she could create, even during the scariest time of her life.

Giertz is known for her beautifully useless inventions. Dubbing herself the “Queen of Shitty Robots,” her creations include mechanical arms to messily apply lipstick, an absurd (but effective) alarm clock that slaps you awake, and a helmet that will haphazardly brush your teeth for you, maybe impaling your eye in the process.

“OK, they’re pretty shitty,” she admits in her channel trailer. “It’s on purpose. Some of them are sh***r than others.”

A Reddit favorite, Giertz has charmed the internet with her bizarre robotic children and deadpan humor. Donning a jumpsuit and recording her building process in front of her workshop’s signature turquoise wall (her new space has the same color scheme), she doesn’t hold back on creativity or colorful language. When she was dropped by sponsors a few years ago for using foul language, she literally didn’t give a fuck.

“2016 has sucked something much worse than dick,” she says in a video titled “Why my sponsors are leaving.” She was recording in an austere engine room in her native Sweden, where she was spending Christmas that year. “One of my sponsors pulled out completely because I said fuck four times in a video. Pulled out.”

Then she gives the camera a cheeky grin.

An entrepreneur and engineer, Giertz is always hustling. She’s in “constant negotiation” with herself over the amount of projects she can take on at once; the ebb and flow of her work pushed her to the brink of falling apart from exhaustion before her surgery. Daily meditation became her way of dealing with the constant movement — setting aside time for herself was necessary for her own mental health amid the demanding nature of her career.

She hit her tipping point when she couldn’t stop crying while filming a TV show in Sweden months before her diagnosis, finally taking a week off mid-production. She called it a “pretty clear sign” from her body and psyche that something in her life needed to change.

“Burn out is such a real thing, especially when you are enjoying your job,” she muses. “80 percent of what I do is so fun, and it kind of bites you in the ass.”

Without getting into the habit of monitoring her mental health, Giertz doesn’t think she would have been able to go through the surgery and recovery process.

HOW MEDITATION GOT HER THROUGH RECOVERY
Preparing for surgery was difficult. Bent on “trying to be the best patient possible,” she wanted the neurosurgeon to tell her that she needed to avoid certain foods, start taking supplements, or start climbing literal mountains every day before going under the knife. Instead, her doctors assured her, she just had to keep doing what she was doing. She was already exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, and living a generally healthy life — there was little she could do other than wait.

“I just wanted a regime,” Giertz recalls, reflecting on how she barely took time off during the month between her diagnosis and the surgery. “If I got action points, I would feel like I was in control of the situation.”

Although she didn’t want to “assume the worst” before surgery, the possibility of chilling side effects loomed over her. She could lose her sight, end up with some degree of cognitive impairment, or wake up paralyzed. Not knowing what could happen to her body was agonizing because she “just wanted to start recovery and work with whatever I had.”

All she could really do was stick to her mindfulness routine — she’s convinced that her body was ready to deal with the grueling recovery process because she was so mentally fortified. On the morning of the procedure, she woke up at 4:30 a.m. to dutifully do her yoga and meditation.

“I’m feeling fine, but I’m pretty scared,” Giertz says in a video she posted right before the surgery. “The healthy response to the prospect of having your skull cut open … I hope you’re having a good day. I hope your day is more normal than mine. I’ll see you in a bit.”

When she woke up the morning after surgery — head still pounding and unable to see — she laid in her hospital bed and spent 10 minutes just wiggling her toes, because focusing on each individual movement was the closest she could get to practicing yoga.

“A lot of my self-worth is based on what I do,” she explains. “And if you take that away I just mope.”

In the days following her surgery, her activities were limited. She felt hungover. She was once that person who couldn’t even sit still through a movie, but during her recovery she was content just laying in her garden and napping. Friends and family flew in from Sweden to take care of her, feeding her strawberries and swaddling her in blankets. She rested and listened to Harry Potter audiobooks, for once satisfied with just relaxing. Giertz calls it the closest she’s ever felt to being a grandma.

Between the army of loved ones making sure she was taken care of and the flood of support online from her fans, she says recovery was “one of the most overwhelming” experiences of her life.

Despite needing 12 hours of sleep and tiring more easily now, Giertz firmly believes her meditation habit pulled her through the haze of recovering from such an extensive procedure. Although she had “every excuse” not to stick with it, she only skipped her practice two days after the surgery because “the catheter and constant throwing up made it kind of hard.”

“Keeping your habits on a good day is easy,” she says. “But keeping them on a bad day is really hard, and those are the days we need it the most.”

IMAGES:
Simone Giertz surrounded by her tools. JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE
Giertz focuses in her workshop kitchen. JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE
“A lot of my self-worth is based on what I do,” she explains. “And if you take that away I just mope.”
SIMONE GIERTZ
Simone Giertz works on one of her new inventions. JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE
Simone Giertz pets her inanimate companion. JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE
Giertz assembles her “ugly desk” for a video. JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE
“She just had this look, and the inflection of her voice and everything … I was like, fuck, they actually found something.” SIMONE GIERTZ
Giertz has had her fair share of chaotic days this year. THE DIAGNOSIS
Simone Giertz works on her “gold star” calendar, which she’s launching a Kickstarter for this month.
JESSICA CHOU/MASHABLE

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