I wrote this while my mom was in the hospital in 2009, it was kind of an ongoing journal for myself. I was in 7th grade:
I can’t believe this is happening. Again. I wake up one morning to being rushed out the door by my dad. When I get into the car, I catch my breath to ask, “What’s going on?”
My father replied, “Julie is in the hospital. You know how she has been having that sinus cold for the last few weeks? Its not a sinus cold. Its swelling.”
“What? What’s swelling?!”
“Her brain. Its swelling severely and the doctors don’t know why. She is being sent to St. Thomas hospital in Nashville to see her doctor. We may be staying with her tonight.”
So we headed down to Nashville to find out what was wrong. When we got to the ICU unit, the nurses were about to send my mother to a different room.
Just by looking at her, I knew something was wrong.
Something was very, very wrong.
My stomach sank. When we came to her new room, the doctor came in to see us. He was also a surgeon.
“It could just be swelling, or the swelling could be hiding something else.” Dr. Abrams said. Something that would devastate everyone in our family.
“We will be doing many blood tests, CT scans, and MRIs to determine what exactly is causing all this swelling.”
That night, my mother was taken in for the tests. They said the results would be in the next morning.
So we waited.
When the results finally came in, all hope was lost.
How did it come back? I thought they got it to the point where it couldn’t come back. Last time, the surgeons got 80% of a baseball-sized brain tumor. This time, the tumor has come back. This time, though, it was just a quarter-sized tumor.
“The stereotactic radiation was supposed to get rid of the tumor. We wanted it to come to the point of swelling, but not to the point that the tumor actually absorbs the swelling to make itself larger. That is what has happened. So we will be going in the same way as last time, using the same incision to go in and remove the tumor. However, I do not believe we will be able to get all of the tumor. You may have to go through this every two years.” The doctor explained. My mother’s surgery was then scheduled for Monday, February 9, 2009, just two days away. This was a do-or-die situation. Either my mom could choose to have brain surgery and have a 90% chance of living, or her condition would deteriorate until the swelling puts her into a coma, killing her. Without the surgery, she would have less than a week to live.
We chose the better way. The way that was supposed to have less suffering.
The next day, my uncle came home from Ohio to take care of me and my brother and help us. He stayed with us to take us to school and to Nashville. So he brought us to Nashville the day of the surgery, and when we got there, she was already out of surgery and off of the ventilator, which is a machine that helps people breathe by putting a tube down their throat. Brain surgery is supposed to last 5-12 hours, but my mom was out in just two hours. The surgeon also got more of the tumor than they expected.
When we went back to see her, something didn’t seem right. Her eyes were bulging a little, her pupils were smaller than normal, and her head seemed… odd. Something told me that the nightmare was nowhere near being over. But everything seemed to be going fine. That is, until the night after the surgery.
