Full disclosure: I wrote a diary Monday asking for financial help with a friend in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I'm writing a diary today asking for financial help with me here in Cary/Raleigh, North Carolina. I know it will probably seem that I'm running a con here, but those of you who know me know that I've been dealing with a brain tumor for quite a while now and that I wouldn't ask unless I needed. And often don't talk to people honestly even when I could use a hug or some help.
When I friend asked me a few days to ago write a plea for help a few days ago because she was facing a ginormous healthcare and potential homelessness emergency, for the first time in my life, I had to think about whether to say "YES!!! YES!!! Yes, of course!!" Because I felt so panicked about my situation I didn't think I could do a diary justice to her (and most certainly didn't). But I also knew that her situation is far more dire than mine, and more of an emergency. And that it would do my heart good. So I wrote it just a couple hours before the hospital shuttle came to pick me up to take me to what might have been a lengthy and terrifying hospital stay.
Because the next day I was headed to Duke Hospital for a length testing process to determine whether a brain shunt was doing its job of drawing away cerebral spinal fluid from the base of my skull, where the CSF was putting undue pressure on a small 3.55mm tumor at the of my skull.
My health has been declining this year, with six hospitalizations and a "forced state of impaired consciousness" to help me heal from a series of bacterial infections that had quickly grown immune to regular antibiotic treatments. So the thinking was that the CSF pressure was creating the tumor to do things it might not ordinarily do. Peer pressure!!
My Japanese neurosurgeon, Dr. Fukushima, who travels around the world treating people with rare and seemingly inoperable tumors oftentimes like the very, very rare tumor and skull construction that I have, has been pessimistic about removing the tumor, because it would require a quick succession of three surgeries in three parts of my body to harvest tissue from my spleen to wrap the sella turcica and keep it from flooding the skull-base with CSF; giving that a day or so to heal; replacing the brain shunt with something that would work a little harder, and then opening up the skull for a 5-8-hour surgery to remove the tumor without damaging the Great Spleen Balloon (Oh, Loooooosy -- you got some 'spleenin' to do!).
He gave me about a 10% of recovering all three surgeries in such a short length of time, considering my compromised immune condition. And unless it becomes a life-or-death situation, this surgeon (who is the world's most highly respected neurosurgeon for this particular constellation of skull-based tumor-with-complications) said it would be the wrong thing to do to put me at that risk. WELL, GOOD NEWS!!
