Monday March 29, 2010 -- Surgery Day

Todays surgery will be 9 hours. As of now they haven't cut into him, but are doing the MRI to prep for the surgery. I will be posting updates throughout the day as to how things are going ... they figure the next update will be around noon.

Update: They informed me that they have now started the surgery. They have made the scalp incision and removed the bone. They are gently trying to flip back the dura "tough mother". It seems to be stuck because of the previous surgery. I am doing great and feel very optimistic about what is happening. Although, Kyle and I didn't want to have surgery we both know that we are doing the best possible thing to get the most of the tumor out. I will continue to update--probably around 2:00

Update: They have removed a resection (tumor) and than wheeled the bed into the MRI to scan him again. They decided that they needed to remove more of the resection. I don't know if we told you before but the tumor is about the size of a dime with arms coming out of it. Kyle thought that it looked like an octopus. The MRI's here have 5 times the resolution to other MRI. They are High Definition MRIs. The pictures are very clear and concise. Next update around 4:00

Surgeon's update: Surgery is over! It ended at 3:40, so Kyle was in surgery for 7 hours and 40 minutes. The surgeon said that they cut along the previous incision, but they had to cut a bigger section of the bone. They had mentioned that they might need to do this because it looked like the tumor was further behind the ear than they had previously cut. Once inside the surgeon said the there was nothing there that looked like an AVM -- strictly a tumor. He noticed where they had taken the biopsy and removed blood clots. There were still some remaining blood clots. Using all of the information that they had from the scans, they mapped the tumor. They learned that the motor function of his brain was 2 inches behind the tumor. So they were very conservative in their removal there as not to disturb that area. They know that they were able to remove 100% of the bulk (enchancing) part of the tumor. But surrounding the tumor is this fuzzy area (non-enchancing) that contains seeds and fingers of the tumor. They feel like they were able to remove 75-80% of the non-enchancing parts. Most surgeon don't even try to take out these parts but here they believe that it is important to remove as much as possible for the greatest success. Radiation and chemotherapy should take care of the remaining non-enchancing. The surgeon felt like the surgery went well and that all of his scans were very helpful.

He is now on his way to ICU. The surgeon said that he thinks that we can fly home on Saturday if all goes well. He has stitches instead of staples. He will have to have them remove next Friday.