September 26, 2021

First of all, I want to thank my wife for putting up with me! She drives me like everywhere, except home from work...lol. She puts dinner on the table like almost every night, and smiles most of the time while doing it...except when my daughter gets on her nerves...never me...lol. She is a great wife and I love her even more now that I'm having this problem, she really does make my life easier. I just can't say enough good things about her!

So last week I got the news that my tumor has progressed, and it was a centimeter or two. That was with a neurooncologist, who recommended; a new neurosurgery including Keytruda an immunotherapy, Avastine a medicine that starves the tumor from blood supply, or radiation but thumbed down the radiation as it is too large. That was on Thursday, a day after my Wednesday MRI with perfusion. 

We setup an appointment with a Neurosurgeon with IU health on Monday for a first opinion. This guy wasn't too sure about picking the surgery up in the middle of the chapter, and he was pretty sure I would lose my speech, like 30-40% sure, since he was going to do it asleep. So I got a second opinion from Mayo, he recommended an awake surgery were he could protect my speech and I would come out without any deficiency, at least minimal anyway. I decided to go with the second opinion needless to say.

So after all that, I went to see my medication doctor on Friday, he also agreed with the plans we had arranged. He said it was good that we had a solid plan going forward, agreed with neurosurgery, and also agreed with the strategy of entering some studies. He agreed with the plan of avoiding Avastin until I needed that solution as it has some nasty side effects like bleeding all over the place since it has blood thinners in it. He basically said call me when your done with all that...little does he know my wife is planning to switch to Unity doctors when we come back...hopefully.

Now we wait on October 5, 5:30 am, that's when surgery is...man...I'm not looking forward to that but at least I know what to expect. We leave out of here on Saturday October 2, for an 8 hour drive up there. Then we spend 7 days there in a nice hotel, thanks Mary Jo for the use of your car, we appreciated it to allow a bit more luxury at the hotel this time around. I have 1 full day to enjoy myself in Rochester, on Sunday, then Monday starts the full on march to surgery on Tuesday morning. I have all kinds of stuff to do on Monday, I think they do that so I'm not dwelling on the surgery. Starting at 7 am with specimen collection which I assume is my COVID test, followed by neurologic testing, meeting with the doctor, MRI brain imaging, preanesthetic, and preoperative medical evaluation. A full day for sure...

Oh and before you ask...they will be going through the same hatch on the side of my head...lol!