After having the tumor removed from my right eye socket in March 2009 I found that my Trigeminal Neuralgia finally seemed to be at peace… it went into remission and I never needed any of those dreadful meds. Six months had passed but I was too scared to poke around my eye to see if I could feel anything abnormal… I was scared to try see if the tumor was growing back so I just ignored it… in 2010 it was now visible to everyone that the bulge on the side of my eye had returned and that meant that the tumor had grown back as I had feared… I went to see the surgeon and he sent me for more scans that confirmed that the tumor was back, I assumed it would be the same op and we keep doing this for as long as we needed to, until it decided to stop growing, I knew leaving it was not an option as it was a pre-cancerous tumor.
This time however the doctor told me that I had to make a decision, to either have the same op that I did previously to remove the tumor which he didn’t suggest because this meant it could grow back again, and this way there was only a limited amount of space to work within and very difficult to see whether all of the tumor tissue was removed as there is so much tissue in the eye. He suggested that we cut a little on the skin, from the side off the eye towards the temple, but only a centimeter or so, cut the bone there and go into the socket from the side of the eye, this way they would have more space to work with and better visibility which was crucial to removing the tumor entirely and not leaving behind even the tiniest amount of tissue & then using a metal pin where they had to break the bone to get into the socket and stitching up again.
I knew this was the better option if I wanted a good chance of this tumor not growing back but I was so scared… I was going to be scared for life but that was the least of my concerns… there’s tiny little branches from the Trigeminal nerve that runs all around that area of the eye, and the surgeon would have to cut through those nerve endings to cut the bone and then put a metal pin in there… all of this felt like it was so unnecessary for me to under go the brain surgery in the first place because ever since then so much had happened to undo all that work to calm the nerves down…
I again consulted my Professor who called me and said that I should do the “bone-flap” because if I did the simple operation and the tumor grew back I could get cancer and then they would have to remove my entire eye ball and it would spread into my face and be unstoppable. He painted a very scary picture in my mind and even though that seemed harsh at the time it was what I needed to hear to push me to be brave and do what I could to get rid the tumor while I had the opportunity to. He said even if it affected the TN, that should be the last of my concerns and we would deal with that when we had to. I was concerned that if it triggered of the TN no one would be able to help me because the last time they gave me the pain-block injections in my nerve it caused my respiratory system to shut down… but the Professor made it clear that that was a small problem in comparison to the possibility of cancer… Spoke to the surgeon who did the my MVD & he too said the same thing… so the Bone-Flap operation was the way to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment