No More Tumor

Long day…

Up before dawn, out the door way too early, to Minneapolis in time for some rush hour traffic, and into the Children’s Hospital Surgery Center.

Ian was prepped and transported over to Abbott Northwetsern for the actual surgery. We were escorted over as well, to a crowded surgery waiting area. So many people there, all thinking about, praying about, their loved ones. Hospitals are such sobering places to be. My heart just aches for all of the families there. I just want to give them all a big hug, and I’m not even really a big hugger, but sometimes we mothers just want to wrap our arms around anyone and everyone that’s hurting, know what I mean?

The nervous energy was running high, at least mine was.

Our parents, our pastor, and a couple of our friends all waited with us, sharing coffee, sharing chit-chat, and playing pass the baby while I tried to knit away some nerves. It all still seemed so surreal, so odd to be sitting there chatting while my son was unconscious in a nearby surgery suite having a craniotomy, and something about a resection of his brain and tumor removal. Everything up to that point had been so calm, so matter-of-fact, so “we’re gonna go in, remove the tumor, we don’t anticipate anything going wrong, Dr. N is one of the best in his field, piece-of-cake…”

The surgery went great. The neurosurgeon is confident that he was able to remove the entire tumor. Ian’s vitals were great, there was very little bleeding (absolutely no more than would be expected), and they moved him to the PICU while we breathed a collective sigh of relief and said a collective “Praise the Lord!”

We were then joined by one of the many people “on Ian’s team”, who explained everything from the consent for research forms, and the drainage tube (from his brain?! draining cerebral spinal fluid?!), to the 3 different types of brain tumors this could be, and how they have an idea what it is but they don’t say a word until after the pathology report comes back.

We were escorted back to Children’s to wait in a family room while they attempted to wake Ian.

After I have no idea how many minutes, we were informed that he was not waking up right away like they expected he would, and they were taking him down to radiology for a CT scan to see if there were any complications. This was a serious surgery, and while problems are rare, if they ever do occur, they’re pretty serious as well- bleeds, strokes, infarctions, swelling of the brain, etc… Serious stuff.

The CT scan looked great, nothing unusual or alarming, nothing to explain why he wasn’t waking up.

They kept telling us that some people just take longer to wake up from anesthesia, while at the same time telling us that this was unusual, and that they were concerned.

**more later- I’ll leave you with the praise report that he did finally wake up enough after about 6 hrs of wondering, worrying, and praying. I’m so tired I can hardly believe it and I keep falling alseep while typing, so, more later