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.