These are words I really never wanted to say, but well here I am… going for Round 2. Let’s just say this month really didn’t go as planned!

To catch you up from my last post (November 2018) life’s been pretty good… I’ve travelled overseas to visit family, I’ve completed incredible half-marathons at Mount Rushmore and in the Colorado Rockies… I enrolled in an MBA program… I turned the Big 5-0 this year and somewhere along the way… my hair grew back!

So how did I get here?

I first started experiencing some unusual headaches in August. In early September I reached out to both Urgent Care at the Cleveland Clinic as well as my family doctor about this. Cleveland Clinic suggested a referral to a neurologist and my family doctor sent me for an x-ray of my neck. Both suggested physio and massage. Throughout October, the sharp, sudden onset headaches became more frequent and longer in duration. I booked another appointment with my family doctor.

In early November, some of the sudden headaches morphed into what I was calling an “episode”: my hearing was being impacted (sounded like I was in a fish bowl!), the head pain would start, and then I would start to feel dizzy and off-balance. While the headaches were daily, the episodes were more infrequent, but were occurring more than once a week; I reported this to my family doctor at an appointment in early November. By the first weekend of December, the “episodes” began to manifest multiple times a day. I booked another appointment with my family doctor, but I also spoke immediately with the original Nurse Practitioner from Urgent Care. It was this NP at the Cleveland Clinic who suggested I go to Emergency, in order get a scan, in order to expedite a neurology appointment. Thank God I followed her advice.

I went to the ER in Oakville, had a CT scan and basically fast-tracked right past a neurology appointment straight to neurosurgery! The CT scan revealed three tumours in my brain – a large one (4 cm in diameter) at the back of my brain, plus two smaller ones on the side. The ER followed up with an MRI and then transferred me that day to Trillium under the care of a neurosurgeon and his team to get ready for the operation. So in a nutshell, I went to ER on Dec 7th for a CT scan, and six days later had brain surgery. Never even went back home.

Up to the Minute: Well the length of this post kinda got away from me… but there are a lot of people who have been asking me questions so I wanted to fill in some blanks…and then some… LOL… Today is December 18th. My surgery was the afternoon of December 13th, and I’ve been back home since noon on December 15th (yep…that’s less than 48 hours after I got off the operating table!). I have care at home 24 hours a day and am well fed and looked after, but am not yet allowed to drink wine 😦

So the surgery was a complicated one, and thankfully it did go better than expected, but we still have to deal with those two other tumours. These will be treated with radiation, and the treatment plan is underway (I have a Radiation Oncology appointment on Friday at Credit Valley). As many of you know, I’m also a patient at Princess Margaret, and the oncology team there has been looped in on this new development. Any proposed treatment plan will be reviewed by both teams – this is important because this cancer is the same one that I had in 2017. Which is actually a good thing: I’ve beat this one once, and I will beat it again.