The Beginning

I'm Mark, and this blog is about my perfect, strong-willed, incrediblely smart, funny, outgoing, loving wife Dana. 

Our Wedding Day, May 7th 2011

We wanted to start this blog up so our family and friends can see how Dana is doing throughout her journey of removing her avm in her brain.  Before we start though, a little background on my wife's condition.

In the summer of 2012 while traveling oversea's, Dana became very ill and we got help recovering at a hosiptal after being admitted for over a week.  We learned that she had developed a bleed inside of her brain.  Luckily for us the bleed was a low pressure bleed from blood vessels and not an artery bleed.

Recovering oversea's

Upon returning home we learned more about this issue and we were told that the chance of a re-bleed were slim and if it did re-bleed we could look at some options to fix it for good.  Regardless, we choose to learn as much as we could about this condition so we had some more imaging done, meet with neurologists and traveled around NC getting expert opinions on how to fix this if it came to that.

Unfortunately for us, February 16th presented us with another bleed and a similar chain of events followed; however it wasn’t nearly as bad as the oversea's episode b/c we knew what we were dealing with and the Dr’s knew exactly how to get her more comfortable.

 

Dana's AVM is circled in red above



Because we’ve had 2 bleeds within 8-9 months we need to fix this issue.  We can’t afford to allow this to continue to bleed.  If we did, some bad things could occur  like: seizures, bleeding into the brain stem, etc.  This past week Dana and I have been meeting with a neurosurgeons discussing our options and we have elected to have brain surgery next week (Wednesday, March 6th, however we don’t have a time yet) to fix this for good.  We’ve had a couple opinions and they all point to this route as being the best suited for Dana.  The location of the cavernoma is ideal when it comes to brain surgery and the operation isn’t as bad as you would imagine it.  She doesn’t have to shave her head, they will only shave a small portion of hair that can easily be hidden.  The operation from start to finish will be a little over 3 hours and we will be in the hospital several days for recovery and then hopefully we’ll be home for the weekend.  Our neurosurgeons exact words were if I had to have a cavernoma this is the exact location I would put it.  The right lower temporal lobe of the brain is where it’s located and because she is right hand dominate, all her memories, who she is, etc is stored on the left side of her brain.  The right temporal lobe is in charge of her musical element and as you all know Dana can’t sing already so no harm there ;). 

 

Lower Temporal Lobe Outlined in Red, #9

Recovery time is the hard part as we can’t do anything that stimulates the mind so that means no computer/tv/phone texting/normal day to day chores for the first 4 weeks.  During this time, I’ll be working from home helping her out and our family and friends will be helping us too.  Weeks 5-6 are a bit better as we will be able to get back into the swing of things minus physical activity and then after that she will be able to work out again and then life will be back to normal.  So, overall it will be around a 2 month recovery time.

Dana and I are doing very good with all this, as we realize we need to fix this.  We’ve gone through a lot of emotions and today we can say we are ready for this.  We are very confident in the procedure they have proposed and we are happy that we can have the surgery next Wednesday.  Please feel free to forward this blog to anyone that you feel would need to know and I’m sorry I left them out.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts and prayers, I am so lucky to have a wife who this strong.  Again we are going to be just fine and we will do our best to keep this up to date.