by Liza
A couple of years ago I went crazy - or so I thought. I was having visual and auditory hallucinations. I could not sleep for more than a couple hours and I constantly had a headache that 7 or 8 aspirin would not take care of. Right before Thanksgiving of 2009 I had a grand mal seizure and my 12 year old called 911. I was in and out of various states of consciousness for 24 hours and was told that the doctor had seen a mass the size of a golf ball in my right frontal lobe. They kept me a week and put me on anti-seizure meds and steroids to shrink the swelling in my brain.
Right before my youngest daughter's birthday, I had surgery to remove the tumor, it was biopsied and determined to be an aggressive anaplastic oliogodendroglioma. Needless to say, our family went into a tailspin and life is not the same to this day. Although the tumor was removed, I continue to have seizures of all types. I wrecked my car (luckily no one was hurt or killed) due to the seizure activity.
Since the first cranioplasty, I've had 6 more surgeries due to infections and non-healing wounds. My last surgery was 6 weeks ago to put a plate in my head to replace the piece of infected skull that was removed. If it had not been for my family support, friends, and work support, we would have been in trouble. I am told this type of cancer is not curable at this time and it will come back some day as a grade IV. So I am trying to give more time to my kids and family. I am trying to live my life without thinking about cancer. Sometimes I can go a whole day without thinking about it and I am determined to be one of the oddballs that beats the statistics.
