diagnostic brain surgery planned now

Diagnostic brain surgery planned. Now waiting......

This has been a confusing, somewhat chaotic week of plans, changes,

and an overload of medical information. John, Mason, and I have

learned way more than we ever wanted to know about craniotomy, brain

biopsies, infection, treatments for infections, being rushed, and

then....and then..... waiting.

Which is what we are doing now. Having agreed that a biopsy of the

infection or lesion is necessary before treating the problem, we are

now awaiting word from the neurosurgery folks about when the surgery

will occur and which surgeon will do it.

The brain surgery will probably happen on Friday of this week or early

next week. The procedure, a diagnostic craniotomy (anaesthesia,

drilling hole in side of skull, removing tissue, then replacing bone),

will take around 3 hours. John will be in intensive care the first

night and then back to a normal room. He will be up walking around

within 24 hours. The sole reason for the surgery is diagnostic. They

won't be removing anything except the biopsy tissue in an area of the

right frontal lobe in an area in which it is apparently safe to

operate. All of the doctors feel they really need to know what they

are treating before they start any treatments for the mystery areas

they are seeing on the MRI.

The treatments that come after the surgery are likely to be

anti-infection drugs delivered intravenously to target whatever they

find. If they find leukemia, which they say is unlkely, the will do

radiation, and that still would have a good chance of long term

healing for John. If he has the infusions, he can likely have the

treatments in Austin, after staying here to heal from surgery and

start the drugs.

To us, brain surgery is scary. I do not feel strong, although up til

now, I've felt pretty strong and that's been spontaneous. John says he

is scared as hell AND he is choosing to do this as the best path to

full healing. I am envisioning very skilled and "beautiful" surgery to

gain all positive benefits for John. We will ask for your healing

energies and prayers during and after the procedure.

The good news in all of this is that they are now sure that what they

see on the MRI is the root cause of John's dizziness, speech and

impaired right arm problems. Identifying and treating this root cause

has a high likelihood of relieving these problems.