NEW 9 days and a few hours pre surgery

Wow! I feel really spaced out. Just a second my doctor just emailed me.

Ok that was really nice. The doctor wrote me a nice email telling me to hang in there.

Basically what happened is that the tumor is pressing on my facial nerve and trigeminal ganglia (maybe they are the same). As a result, I got shocking pain in my ear and face like I was being electricuted.

Steroids were prescribed to me (4 mg a day of decadron). Harley spoke with the doctor on Tuesday after the first episode which was really stunning (seriously like someone was shocking my face and ear with a tazer!). My surgeon wanted to move up the surgery if I continued to have these episodes after starting the steroids.

Let's just skip over because I am too tired to type. As of 3:09 this morning I had 9 episodes. The one last night/this morning lasted nearly 20 minutes. I got a different medication to also take for pain called Tegretol (did I already say that).

Anyhow, I am really spaced right now and LOL I was trying to figure out what was on my head and then realized I am wearing a baseball cap from my walk this morning!

Ok the new schedule:

I was kind of hoping maybe we could go back to the October date until I had the 9th episode this morning. Pooper. I guess that was a sign that I have to stick with surgery in 9 days.

I figured 2 things to come to acceptance of this:
A) The steroids seem to manifest the worst side effects in 3 weeks. If surgery is at the original date I would experience these bad things. Having surgery earlier means that hopefully I will not have to take the steroids as long and this trigeminal neuralgia will be relieved.

B) The steroids alone are not working. The additional drug I am taking really is not good for me at all but it beats having the pain. Having surgery earlier means having to take less of this medication over a shorter period of time hopefully. If I had the surgery later, we would need to keep increasing the dose of the second medication.

That means I would be on 3 meds. Not too good.

Additionally, the steriods affect the immune system so it is better to be on them a shorter time presurgery to lessen the chance of infection.

Oh yeah new schedule:

September 18th - pre-op appointment in Portland
September 24th - "the" surgery
After that ICU (best case 1 day) and then I am moved into a regular room until I can be released.