Surgery Day

6:30
There is no bandage on the incision and it looks amazingly clean. Probably only 3 inches long and they didn’t even shave his eyebrow. He is alert, but pretty drowsy and in very little pain. They are giving him morphine, just to keep him comfortable. He’ll stay in ICU overnight and likely get moved to a regular room tomorrow. Thanks for all the good thoughts and prayers.
5:30pm
The Dr. came out and explained the surgery to me. First the scans that Kev had last night indicated significant growth since last week and a pretty large new blood clot. He was surprised Kevin had not noticed any symptoms… well... hmm.. actually there was that intense headache followed by nausea attack on Monday afternoon that Kev attributed to a touch of the flu that seems to be going around... Well, never the less, it would have just moved his admit date up and came with a couple doses of steroids. The incision – there were two options. The classic approach for this part of the brain is an ear-to-ear incision at the top of the forehead, then peel that flap back to get at the surgery location. Kev’s neurosurgeon wanted to try a new approach he calls his “stealth” option. It is an incision just above the eyebrow. He decided to go with the “stealth” approach. From there it is similar as before. A section of bone is removed, the tumor and blood products are removed, the area is cleaned, the bone is re-installed with three dog-bone splices and the incision is sewn up. Everything went very well and Kev is moved to ICU.
4:30pm
The nurse came out to say the resection is near complete and “they are drying up the area”. Next comes closure and then the Dr will come out to tell me how it went.
2:00pm
Well we are off to a very late start. There was an emergency early this morning with a 13-year old girl and our neurosurgeon was needed. So we waited in pre-op for 6 hours. Not a problem for Kev since he didn’t get home until 1:00 am last night. (He had an MRI scheduled at 10:00 pm, but things ran late…). And since he had a bed, he slept the entire morning. Not much for companionship, but I was entertained by the two female 60-somethings next to us, who have been best of friends since middle school and were reminiscing about their wild times in the 1960s & 70s. They were laughing so hard, they may have been enjoying a few things other than memories leftover from the 60s…
The waiting room is nice – hot drinks and a wireless network, in addition I brought my knitting project and Doctor Zhivago – it’s not very often I get 3+ hrs to watch it in full.