Brain tumors and more...

(I"m posting this on the blog and emailing to everyone as well)

Okay, I don't have the energy right now to respond to everyone's emails or calls. Please don't think I'm ignoring you, I'm just exhausted. This has been a lot to process, and the medication they've given me has finally knocked me out after several days of headaches.

Here are the basics of what we know:

I have 2 brain tumors. One is about a centimeter in diameter behind my eyes. The other is about 3 centimeters on top of my head. Both are meningiomas. They're not expected to be cancer, they're slow growing, and so far, neither is causing any problem. They found these through a routine MRI when I was being evaluated for a new migraine medication. Total fluke, they weren't expecting anything like this either.

I also have apparently suffered a small stroke. There is a small area of dead brain tissue which is not causing any neurological effects, but it's there. I don't have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc... so they're running a battery of tests to determine why I had a stroke or if in fact this dead brain tissue is just from migraines. We'll schedule those tests next week.

I'm feeling fine, just very tired from the 2 shots they gave me yesterday to help me get some much needed sleep. They haven't asked me to change my lifestyle except to stop taking birth control pills, because they increase your risk of stroke and not do anything strenuous, until they figure out what's going on.

In the meantime, we're researching a lot. We plan to meet with the local neurosurgeon on March 3rd and go from there. The size of this tumor is borderline, so we'll wait to see if he wants it removed. If so, we'll ask to be referred to the Mayo Clinic outside of Minneapolis. They do thousands of gamma knife surgeries there each year, rather than having to slice into my skull.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and prayers during this crazy time. We'll let you know when we learn more.