Aug 18/2011

Well hopefully this is the beginning of things starting to calm down now. After weeks and weeks of planning, we held our fundraiser this past Sunday and despite the poor weather, it was a fairly good turnout. I think the Gall family is on their way to Disney!! We are still going to do some smaller fundraising to assist with spending money etc.
I was super proud of my daughter Faith....she came with me to help volunteer and lasted the entire 14 hours! I was truly impressed to see that from a 9 year old :)

Angela is finally out of the hospital as of yesterday so now she gets to start living her life again. She'll be supported by Homecare daily and there are still a ton of loose ends for me to work on but with any luck, that too will eventually slow down. It HAS to because I am really feeling the effects of all this running around for both the fundraiser and assisting getting Angela back on her feet.

Ok, on to my world....I went to see the plastic surgeon about the hole on the top of my head that has never healed properly since my last surgery in August 2008. The hole has actually continued to get wider and deeper. Deep enough that during my visit A(although I already knew this)the Doc noticed a bone fragment protruding out of the hole. So he instructs his Resident to, in layman's terms, go get a pair of pliers. Then they proceed to snip away at this bone about 6-7 times with no local freezing or anything. Not a fun experience!! Needless to say, I had a killer headache for the remainder of the day (on top of my usual 24/7 headache lately)

So a few days later, I ge a call from the Neurosurgeon who did my last craniotomy at University Hospital, booking me an appt to come see him. Ends up that I have a very nasty infection in my head that may have affected part of the skull bone also. This infection (pseudomosis) is very resistant to antibiotics I was told. So my next visitor that day was from the "Infectious Disease Control" team to assess the issue and come up with a plan.At the end of the day, I was put on 2 different strong antibiotics for a month and was told that if this does not clear it up, they may have to consider surgery to remove some infected bone and replace it with something synthetic. The party continues!! Ugh

Cancer Clinic appt next week to determine whether to keep me on chemo or not. They can't do surgery if I'm on chemo. I guess we decide whats the lesser of the 2 evils at that point.Then to add more drama to the issue, we need to make a decision on holding off on this surgery until we see the results of my next brain scan in September at which point we (I) will decide whether or not to have them attempt to remove some, if not all, of the larger tumour of the two that are currently in there. Major risks involved with that surgery so I will have a lot of thinking to do next month regarding the risk factors, what deficits I would be left with and what quality of life I would be left with.

So yeah, I need to clear my plate off real soon so that I can start concentrating on me.....I feel September is going to be a very trying month.

As the song goes....."its like trying to turn around on a one-way street..."

Until next time..

Ed