April 21

Dammit.  I'm a day late (I was physically home for about an hour yesterday) and I already know that I am not going to be able to give this part of the story justice in the....let's see.....15 minutes I have to write, so I think I may have to come back to this one again. 

So, I left off with my internist referring me on to a neurosurgeon.  Not a neurosurgeon - THE neurosurgeon - the best one that Austin, Texas had to offer.  His name: Dr. Marvin Cressman and, at the time that I first met him, he was still in practice at the age of 73 years old.  He was old school, to say the very least - stepping into his office was like stepping 30 years back in time.  The 70's were alive and well in this part of the medical district, albeit with a few modern touches thrown in - most notably the light screens behind his desk which illuminated my MRI scans from the day prior.  Even to my medically untrained eyes, I could see, in pretty perfect definition, the tumor sitting on the top of my brain.  It is a really surreal experience to be able to look at your head from a multitude of angles and realize that there is something unidentifiable inside your skull that, just 3 days prior, you had no idea existed.  Even more surreal is to have a 73 year old physician tell you that, at the age of 25, you need brain surgery to remove a tumor that would grow to lethal dimensions within a year. 

We discussed a variety of options - family and friends had been offering their stories of brain surgery that either they or someone they had known at some point had experienced.  I asked intelligent questions like, "I was told that some types of tumors can be removed through the nasal cavity.  Is that possible here?"  He made it clear that the only choice, both because of the size and because he felt that the tumor had been in my brain for ten years (TEN years....that's ALOT of headaches that were suddenly explained), the only option was a full craniotomy.  I think I did all of the talking in our meeting - I mean, I was the one with the damn brain tumor after all - but, I remember that my husband and my mother, both of whom accompanied me to the appointment - let me take the lead almost exclusively.  At the end, I thanked him for his time and let him know that I needed to seek a second opinion.  He agreed and offered me the name of another physician who partnered with him for his on-call times.  I walked out of his office and back into 2004, MRI scans in hand and the knowledge that I would need to have brain surgery.  At 25.  With a husband and a baby girl and about a million plans ahead of me.