Little spoiler...brain surgery stinks. A lot. It's not fun. I kinda forgot but then was reminded after I woke up in a lot of pain. I think it's kinda like it is for women forgetting the pain of child birth so they'll go through child birth again. If you remembered what it was really like you wouldn't be so for it. But given the alternative, with brain surgery I'll still take the surgery. After quite a day, a long long day (one that involved waiting super long for an MRI that was required before room placement after a surgery) we got to travel to my spacious, private, room so I could actually see some of the of the family that had made the trip. (Other than my wife I couldn't see anyone else in recovery - after getting to the hospital at 5:15 am we probably didn't get into the room until after 6:30 pm, even though I was in recovery around noon.) But a successful brain surgery covers up a lot of blemishes.
That night was pretty awful. The incision wounds were still fresh and the staff needed to wake me up every two hours to check vitals and "provide" a neurological test. The next day and night were much better. Apparently I healed quickly enough that they felt confident I could head out the door on Sunday. I had the bandages removed in the morning and had reduced my pain meds to just a little. All that was really necessary was to continue tapering down the necessary post-surgery steroid after getting home. And I had some emergency pain relief medication with me too - since there can be some pain associated with brain surgery.
By Sunday afternoon I was home. I was tooling around our apartment and got to sleep in my own bed. Amazing! Ok, well actually it wasn't that great, but comparatively it was much better than the hospital. Every day since surgery I have definitely physically improved a little. Today I had a home health care therapy intake and tomorrow I will have the evaluation. Next Tuesday, 7/17, I will have a post-operative MRI and next Wednesday, 7/18, I will have a post-operative evaluation with my neuro-surgeon (and probably a short meeting with my neuro-oncologist too). I don't know when I'll get the pathology results from what was removed in the surgery. They could come back as early as tomorrow but, depending on how time sensitive the information is the Drs may wait until next Wednesday to discuss them with me. At this point though, I'm used to waiting.
