The Week That Was : Aug. 17-26, 2009

As most of you know, I underwent brain surgery last week, on the morning of August 18, to be exact.

The purpose of the surgery was to get me ready for the second stage of my treatment plan: Gamma Knife Radiation. So let me be very clear, I am at this point by no means rid of my tumor yet. About half of it is still there. This is by choice, we will leave it there, although we will radiate it, "kill" it so that it doesn't start to grow again. Ironically, the first stage is by far the more difficult and more invasive. The radiation should be relatively easier to get through. So I'm glad we've more or less gotten past this first stage. We just have to wait a few months for the swelling to go down, for the tissues to stabilize, and then we can radiate. The reason we could not go go directly into radiation was because my tumor was already quite large and the necessary dosage of radiation might be harmful to my brain, so we made it smaller first.

In a month or two I'll get a new mri and I can put up a comparative scan so we can all see how much exactly is left.

The more inqusitive among you may ask, having gone ahead with actual surgery, why not just go for the whole enchilada and try to take the whole thing out. Yes, this was an option. BUT, the more we tried to take out, the more we risked taking out bits and pieces of nerves, which would leave me with possible functional losses such as facial paralysis, inability to swallow, coordination problems, etc. Those were risks I did not want to take.

So from the start, I made it very clear to my surgeons, Dr. Eduardo Mercado and Dr. Michael Louise Gimenez, that I wanted to err on the side of caution and preserve function at all costs. I thank those two fine surgeons for respecting my wishes. In a way, it was a bit of a dis-service to them because implicit in those wishes was an "order" to undershoot perfection; and in short, I may have kept them from full fullfillment of their craft. So I thank them as much for their skill as their humility and humanity.

In my mind the resuts are beautiful. I have my matinee-idol smile back in full radiance. I feel no loss in coordination and can swallow perfectly normally, something which will be critical to the food trips to come.

I do have some unconrollable hiccupping and GI disturbances, but in all, while very bothersome, I consider these very minor and I believe wholeheartedly that they should resolve on their own. My brain is not swelling up, and I believe I've lost no functions.

In short, I'm Back!