Surgery is scheduled for 7:30am Monday 1/5/2015 and will last about 3 hours. Dr. Michael Levy, M.D., Ph.D. and his team will be doing the operation. He is highly skilled and we have full confidence the team can do this task.
It was a quiet night and morning as far as seizures go. Plenty of beeps and clicks and movement to allow me (Cecillia) lots of opportunities to fall asleep again. Some things never change at the hospital.
Other things change a lot. Since we last needed to spend the night at Children's, they built a whole new fancy building. The Hem/Onc unit takes up the whole 2nd floor. We have been on the outpatient side of this floor, but this is the first time over on the inpatient side. We have a private room with lots of bells and whistles. Since it is a weekend, it is fairly quiet around the whole campus.
I mentioned the Ronald McDonald House. It is incredible. When they built the new building for the hospital, they also built a new parking structure which actually is built on the side of the slope across the street - so most of the structure goes down instead of up. They decided to put the Ronald McDonald House on top of the parking structure - so from the street it looks like the second floor of the parking structure. There are about 30 rooms for families to stay the night (all booked up with a waiting list right now), courtyards, exercise facilities, quiet nap rooms, computer room, play room for small children, etc, etc. We are taking advantage of their laundry and shower facilities. Most of these amenities are available for all the parents at the hospital - you just have to show your green hospital band. This is all in addition to the free meals I mentioned in my last post.
11am - We just met with Dr. John Crawford, M.D., M.S., Les's neuro-oncologist. He was able to show us the MRI images. We could see the difference between the 2013 MRI and 2014 MRI. I attached a photo. Dr. Crawford was very confident that the surgery is pretty straight forward and the recovery should be quick (a few days at most?). This was confirmed by another team member, Dr. Hong, from the neurosurgery team.
Today's job is to rest, eat and just hang out. The flu restriction makes for a stinky visitation set-up. Know that we would love to see all of you, but we just can't make it work very well. Hopefully we will be home soon and can see you then.
