The Summary

So after being lifeflighted to the hospital and Diagnosed with a brain tumor. My little boy Armstrong has had quite a long couple of weeks.

His first surgery was the Monday before Thanksgiving. They did a large C incision on his left side and removed his entire left temporal lobe. It was pretty scary watching him recover from that surgery. When he woke up his brain wasn't working well yet. He was making weird grunts and noises and couldn't talk. But within hours his little brain had re-wired some of those functions and he was saying small words. By the next day he was talking just fine. The brain truly is an amazing organ.

The tissue sample from that surgery was sent off to the pathologist to give us a diagnosis. The neurosurgeon had already prepared us for the fact that he thought it was malignant. But we definitely were not prepared for what the final pathologist from John Hopkins University said Armstrong's tumor was. The pathology came back saying that the tumor was unclassified. It did not match any current forms of cancer. They believe it has aspects of 4 different high-grade malignant tumors. Which means it is in the harder to treat category, so they planned another 2 surgeries to remove as much of the tumor as possible before he started chemo and radiation.

But just yesterday they came and told us that after the first part of the tumor was taken out the middle section died off a bit and so they are only going to do 1 more surgery, at least for now. This was good news for Armstrong and for us. It is really hard to see your little baby boy going through the pain of surgery. It will be even harder to watch him suffer through the sickness of chemotherapy and radiation, but at least that does not involve a knife and a operating room.

So here we are… Today is December 10^th, 2008 and my 3 year old is having his second brain surgery.

12-Steps and Helicopter Rides

By the end of this day my baby boy will be hanging on for his life… My husband begging to be released from a small middle eastern country… and the life I once knew totally destroyed.

Thursday November 20, 2008 started out ok. I had training for my work and was driving over two hours to get there in the morning.

All four of the kids were up and moving by 6am. We had dressed for school the night before so getting to the babysitters house wouldn't be as much of a problem in the morning. My 2 oldest kids were sleeping on the couch while I hurried to get shoes, socks, and coats on my 3 and 4 year old boys. The littlest one, Armstrong, was particularly playful on this morning. This was nice to see since he had seemed to have the stomach flu for almost a week before this. We hurried out to the van and over to the daycare. I kissed each of the kids and off I went to work for a long day of 12 step training for my position as a drug and alcohol counselor.

As I listened to a fellow therapist discuss the goal of step-3 I felt the familiar bounce of my cell phone in my purse. I was sitting in the front row of the class and tried to ignore the vibrating phone. But only seconds later it went off again. Slowly I leaned down to check who was calling me. It was my children's babysitter. Since the 3 older kids were already at school only the youngest of my kids was still at the daycare. I put the phone back into my purse and vowed to wait the 15 minutes until break to call her back. But then the phone rang again, and then a fourth time. My gut was telling me to answer it so I headed out of the classroom so I could see what the babysitter might need that was so urgent.

"Armstrong started shaking while he was lying on the couch and now he isn't responding to me at all!" The babysitter cried as she said the words.

What? My brain didn't comprehend the words she had said. He wasn't responding? What did she mean by that. I froze. Right there in the middle of the busy office hallway, everything went silent. The world was put on pause as I searched my brain for what to do. "Call 911", I said calmly. "Hang up right now and call 911."

I hung up and searched for someone in my office that could tell me what to do. What do you do when your 3 year old baby boy is "unresponsive" and you are over two hours away? What is a mother to do?

I chose to panic!

Running into my friends office I was shaking and crying. I told her what was going on. We tried calling the babysitter back but she was on with 911. I tried emailing my husband through my cell phone, but ended up pushing so many buttons that the phone locked. Panic ran through my body. What was happening? How could I fix this? I didn't know any of those answers. But I did know that I wanted to be where Armstrong was so I ran out of the office building and got started on the long trip home.

When my phone was working again I sent the urgent text to my husband. "Emergency. Call now!" He didn't call instantly like my mind hoped he would. Instead it was 20 minutes down the highway before he called.

"What's going on?" He asked.

"Army is unresponsive. The ambulance is taking him to the hospital." Is what I thought I said. Instead Rik heard "unresponsive. Hospital. My baby. What to do. How get there!"

His confusion and questions over what I was saying was infuriating to me. Listen to me. It's not hard to understand, I kept thinking. But in reality I was sobbing so uncontrollably he definitely couldn't hear me. When I was finally able to stop crying, he went to work calling the local hospital trying to figure out what was going on with our baby boy.

Not 10 minutes had gone by and I received a call from our local police chief saying that Armstrong was being life flighted to Creighton University Hospital in Omaha, NE. He was on the helicopter now and as far as he knew, Armstrong was still not responding to anything, but he was breathing on his own.

It was an hour before I reached the emergency room, but it seemed like a day, a week even! I prayed. I bartered. I swore profanity. But never did I think for a second I would receive that news that I did on that November afternoon.