Brain Surgery

This post is #12 in a year-long series ... Through this series of posts I plan to share our family's experiences during our 17-year-old daughter's year-long battle with brain cancer, which began in February of 2008. My desire is to process through the events of that year from the perspective that a decade of time has brought ... for myself, really. But if you'd like to follow along, you're welcome to join me.

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February 25, 2008

Very early that morning, a nurse came by our room to check on Hannah, as was routine.  We asked her if surgery was still on for 7:30, and she said no, it would not be until 3:00 that afternoon.  We breathed a little sigh of relief for the temporary reprieve, and quickly called our parents and told them not to get in any hurry to come.  Half an hour later, the chief resident came by and told us we would be going down for surgery in about twenty minutes.  What?!   We called our parents back and told them to go ahead and start the 50-mile drive to the hospital.

I'm not sure how much time actually passed before a volunteer arrived in our room and we started the trip to the OR.  Walking beside Hannah's bed as he rolled it down the long hallways was one of the most surreal experiences of my life to that point.  It was during that walk I began to fully realize that life as we had known it was about to irrevocably change.  It was no longer so easy to dismiss the list of risks the surgeon had reviewed with us the night before.  Would Hannah still be the person she had been for 16 1/2 years?  Would she even survive this surgery?

The volunteer left the three of us alone for a few minutes in a little room outside the OR.  We prayed and cried together for a little while, and Hannah asked me to promise her I would not leave the waiting room.  That was an easy promise to make ... I wasn't going anywhere!  By the time our surgeon arrived, we had more or less pulled ourselves together.  I don't remember anything he said, but I know Brad told him we were praying for him.  Hannah was given a shot of something, and within just a few seconds she told us she felt like she was floating.  Then she was rolled away from us and my heart and soul went with her.  Brad and I spent a few minutes together in that private area, then went up to the waiting room, where there was already a crowd of folks waiting for us.

The entire surgery lasted 5 1/2 hours.  Once an hour, the lady manning the waiting room desk would call us to the phone, where the report each time was that everything was going, "So good."  Our group would rejoice with each one of these good reports.  At one point the entire group of folks who were there waiting with us went to the chapel to spend some time in prayer, except for Brad and me.  I wasn't leaving the waiting room.  As lunch time came and went, our friends and family went to eat, and someone brought me back a piece of pizza.  Food was not allowed in the waiting room, and I wasn't leaving ... so I sat on the floor with people around me to shield me from view and gobbled it down.

Finally, our surgeon arrived at the door.  He gave us the best news we could possibly hear at that moment ... The surgery went well; Hannah was awake and talking; and he believed he had gotten all of the tumor.  Oh, THE JOY!  After he left, our whole group circled up and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving, accompanied by tears of sweet relief.

Hannah was brought from surgery directly to the PICU, which is where we got to see her for the first time after surgery.  I wish I had been a bit better prepared for how she was going to look.  Her face was swollen and bloated, and her eyes!  They were wild, glassy, and unfocused and when I first saw her, my heart froze in my chest because I just knew she was blind.  It soon became apparent that she could see, though her vision seemed somewhat impaired.  She was very relieved to see us and said that she'd been asking to see us "for a long time".   She was relieved to know that she still had hair, which was now in two long ponytails on each side of her head.   We could see the dressing on her incision peeking out from behind her head.

After we visited with her for a bit, we brought Bethany in to see her.  Hannah told her she loved her and assured her that she would be okay, which made Bethany cry.  Her grandparents and aunts and uncles each came in and spent a few minutes with her.  Finally it was time for everyone else to head home (Brad stayed with a friend in Little Rock that night so he could be close by).  As Brad left, she told him, "Adios, Daddy."  Yes, her favorite class was Spanish.  Then Hannah and I were on our own.

It was an incredibly long night.  We were in an overflow section of the PICU ... basically an open ward with several other beds.  Every other bed was occupied by a baby, and then there was us.  There was constant activity going on around us, and the bright overhead lights stayed on all night long.

I had told Hannah the night before that after her surgery she would be given some good drugs and just be able to relax and sleep for a few days.  I could not have been more wrong.   I did not know that brain surgery patients are given minimal medication, because it's important to monitor their responses for the first few days after surgery.  She was awake all night long ... It was almost as if she could not close her eyes.  I sat in a rolling chair beside her bed holding her hand ... until the nurses came and turned her, when I shifted to sit on the arm of the chair on the other side of her bed.  Back and forth we went, every couple of hours throughout that night.

She talked a lot, but I recall only jumbled bits and pieces.  I remember that she called me "Mommy" all night, which she had not called me since she was a little girl.  She battled fear off and on throughout that night, telling me at one time that she felt like her whole body was in shock (which it almost certainly was).   Another time, she told me she was playing Tetris in her head.

While her moments of fear seemed to come and go, my fear was constant.  Hannah ran a low-grade fever all night, leading me to believe she was getting an infection.  I found myself staring constantly at her heart rate and blood pressure on the monitors, panicking inside each time they blipped upward or downward.  I wished so badly that they could give her something to help her sleep, or even to just relax.  Out the window, I had a perfect view of the Arkansas state capitol ... and I saw both the sun both set and rise.

Hannah finally drifted off about 5:00 am and slept until 6:30.  When she fell asleep, I stiffly left my perch on the arm of the chair and tried to sleep in it for a little while.  Fully dressed, bathed in the bright lights of the PICU, and with zero privacy, sleep was elusive.