Oligo Woe Is Me

So we first met with the head of brain surgery. This is one of those guys with the mahogany offices and is tops in his field. It was his opinion that the risk of operating and attempting to take this thing out outweighed the likelihood of a successful procedure. He had some fabulous images that showed exactly what and where the tumor is and what parts the functional areas it has wrapped into. Some pretty important parts. Comments and concerns of loss of speech and potential paralysis of one or more physical appendages had a play in those risks. He did suggest that not doing surgery at this point does not eliminate the possibility in the future should chemo and radiation not have enough favorable results on things. It just that the risk at this stage does not warrant the action of trying to get fancy.  There’s one more opinion to add to the list.

Next appointment is at 2:30 with the head of neuro-oncology who will discuss with us his perspective and opinion on the best approach to treatment. And then sometime in the next week to ten days the process will begin. If anyone knows where I can find a reasonably priced Flock Of Seagulls wig, please let me know.

More later…

Part 2

Didn’t get to the hotel until 7pm.  Dog tired.  The blog is gonna have to wait.  There’s about 34 more chapters anyway, and 32 of them are still absorbing into my grey matter.  So I’ll just say goodnight for now.

🙂

Well, it’s a little after 2am again, and here I am blogging.  in just about 10 hours we sit down for the first of “the meetings” with the various really smart people who will share the detailed info and give us the perspective on things.  And then over the next night or two some decisions will need to be made.

I’ve done well keeping my mind and spirit occupied with enjoyable things.  Tonight my little Sadie  Rose was sobbing at sleepytime so I seized the opportunity to snuggle in bed with her and get her to rest easy.  About 1:55am she elbowed me in the nose and now I’m here blogging.  Those love taps can hurt sometimes.  And least it wasn’t the all-too-common kick in the pills.  It’s hard to find any humor in pill kicking…even when it’s accidental from a sweet sleeping four-year-old.

I can no longer force the aforementioed speculation out of my front and center.  What will I learn today?  Routine treament for routine brain tumor?  Will I need to find a sweet  “Flock Of Seagulls” wig to enhance a thinning coif?  Will  it be some radical new technology that will make it all go away?  Or am I just plain screwed?  Questions questions questions flooding into the ping-pong-ball-enhanced mind perched upon my shoulders.  What does the cosmos have in the plans for me?

One comfort is that I truly believe I am in very, very good care.  The two doctors that are “in charge” of my particular case happen to be the guys that are the top dogs at the Mass General Brain Center.  These are very serious dudes.  Thier job is saving peoples lives.  Talk about job pressure.  Yikes.

It’s almost 3am now.  My plan is to kick the woodstove back up, wrap myself in a comforter, and put something really tasty on my fancy audiophile headphones.  And wait for the sun.

~R

…waiting for the time to come.

It is now about 2am Thursday early morning. While I try to keep myself completely occupied with other things (sleeping doesn’t count because i just lay there and think), there is a constant hyper-thread running through my consciousness about what we are going to learn during our meetings at Mass General this Friday. I feel that the closer it gets, the harder it is becoming to avoid the human nature to speculate. I’ve had a lifelong obsession with speculation what I was going to speculate about whenever I felt the urge to speculate. Well, not this time. I knew that I needed to just completely focus my energy on something else. Anything else. But here I sit. 2:02am. And I’m just being pulled in like a moth to a flame. So I decided to blog about my overwhelming urge to begin a speculate-a-thon. Or maybe I can find a good Jerry Lewis movie on Netflix. What would Jerry do?

Anyway, this Friday we meet with The A-Team over there in Boston to gain knowledge and perspective about just exactly what we’re dealing with here. The tests have been done, the computers have analyzed the data, and the experts and surgeons have met and reviewed what’s what. But we don’t get the debrief until Friday beginning at 12:30 in the afternoon. It’s going to be a long morning. Easy on the coffee. Easy on the everything. The bitch of it all is that the “news” can be as far reaching as tapping out on either end of the possibilities. Could be good, could be not so good, could be downright devastating. Just simply won’t know until the meetings get to that stage. At which point any speculation becomes obsolete and the focus radically shifts gears into decision making time.

I guess I really don’t know what Jerry would do. Or actually really care. But I think I’ll forego the speculation for just this one more sunrise and sit down at my piano for the next few hours waiting for the the day to get here. With any luck I’ll wake up with piano key marks indented into my forehead. Might be a good look for me. I’ll let you know.