Mom has had some problems with dizziness and she has been seeing an Ear-Nose-Throat doctor for some time. In this process there have been various tests including a CT scan but physical therapy seems to be the best thing for helping the dizzy spells. Most recently in this process the ENT recommended an MRI just to make sure everything was OK, and this is when we first learned of the tumor. That happened at the end of June and at first they said it would be 6 weeks until August 15th before a neurologist could even see her to discuss the scan.
Fortunately we were able to get in early and saw Dr. Greenlee at UIHC here in town on July 20th. He explained where the tumor was and what our options were. The tumor is about the size of a nickle on the left side of her brain. It is about 1.5 inches deep into the brain, but we were told there was a very safe and clear pathway to get to it and get it out. We could have waited three months for another scan, but we decided that "that thing" didn't belong there and we were going to take it out.
On July 27th we came in for the 6 hour surgery. It went very well and there were no surprises or complications during surgery. They were able to remove the entire thing, and sent it to pathology. We are hoping at the end of this week we will get the results. The tumor is a meningioma which is typically benign. Based on the location, the tumor was probably not the reason for the dizziness in the first place, but it's still nice to get it out. (We'll deal with the dizziness later.)
Right after surgery mom was already awake and making jokes with us which was great. She spent that first night in surgical ICU (which we expected) and the next morning she moved to a regular hospital bed. Since then there has been a little progress each day, but we are always hoping that it could go a bit more quickly because we want her to be back to her
No comments:
Post a Comment