Surgery Update: It went great!
January 8, 2008We just met with the surgeon…Its about 6pm and Misty is still getting stapled up and moved into Intensive Care. Basically, he was able to remove a significant amount of the tumor, including all the scar tissue from her first surgery back in 2000. He thinks this will eliminate the problems she has been having lately with speech, which is really what we were going for. There is no expectation of a surgery removing ALL of a cancer. For the type of brain tumor Misty has, this doesn’t happen – we do however, expect God to heal her! Overall, the surgery was 4 hours and was very successful. She shows no signs of damage from the surgery right now, so that means she will probably fully recover in the next month or so.
For those of you who are interested, the surgery process is fairly amazing. The surgeon maps out her brain and hooks her up to a real time MRI. He then goes in to the offending area and resects the bad tissue. Meanwhile, Misty has to be awake talking to a speech specialist. If at any time her speech breaks away from the norm, the doctor knows he has to back off and can’t touch that are. So they do this probing around the edges to make sure they get everything possible and nothing that they really dont want to mess with. Unfortunately, this process causes a bit of trauma to the brain and in the days following a surgery like this, it is normal for a patient to have very limited communication capabilities. We are hoping this degraded time stays to a minimum, but expecting a few weeks of it at least.
Bottom Line: It went very well. We and the doctors are happy.