Well, Slap Cream Cheese on my Ass and Call Me a Bagel!

It was all in my head!! The cause of all my weird ailments, that is.

I have a tumor! And I couldn't be happier!!

Oh sure, I know it sounds, well, very wrong to be excited about having a tumor inside your skull. I'm sure my doc down at Stanford is a bit confused by the cheering and laughing his announcement caused. But god DAMN. The last doctor I spoke to told me that if I really *wanted* to, I could go drop the money to have an MRI taken, but he was fairly convinced there was nothing there. So, I've been dragging myself around for weeks, even more depressed because a) I thought everything was psychosomatic and b) I was wasting everyones time and money by taking all of these ridiculous tests that were going to do noting more than prove that there was nothing there. (Actually, the last time I took a test like that I turned up PREGNANT, so maybe I should've had more faith.)

I got to look at my head sliced up into bits via the MRI images, and boy, that was really strange. I look really WEIRD from the inside. The doctor gave me a tour of the inside of the skull and let me tell you its a good thing I don't have to travel there often. I got so lost! That's TOTALLY not what I thought it looked like in there. That's where the pituitary is? That's what my sinuses look like? Looking at the images was definitely one of those horrified fascination kind of things. Gross, but kinda cool. I'm gonna get copies of the images on a disk from my doctor; I'll try and post them soonish.

Hang on just a second; I need to do a quick celebratory happy dance again (swings booty from side to side.)

Ok, I'm back. So, onto the tumor. Its on my pituitary gland, which is basically located directly behind the bridge of your nose, in this enormous sinus cavity that's larger than my first apartment. It hangs from this little stem-like thing from the bottom of your brain right next two two major arteries and some retinal nerves. Normally the gland is fairly uniform in shape and size, and mine is all lumpy and bulge-y and half of it is covered with this shadowy-looking thing (that'd be the tumor.) Doc says it looks to be between 5-10 years old, and that most of these types of growths are very slow growing. From what he can tell, he's assuming its benign (but will definitely check that once it comes out,) and it appears to just be growing on the outside of the gland and not feeding off of it, so I shouldn't have to lose any of the gland. The tumor is also located on the front and bottom side of the gland, which should make it easy to access. A bit close to an artery, but not impossible.

The pituitary controls most of the hormones in your body (I didn't know a lot of this stuff, so forgive me if I'm stating the obvious,) which explains why I have too much growth hormone, DHEA, cortisol, and a handful of other important things, and why I am actually short on a few others. And with all of this stuff so screwed up, that does a hell of a job explaining why I can't sleep, have migraines, can't lose weight, probably some of the depression, and why my body reacts so strongly to certain medications and hormones, among other things.

You may be asking "So, now that you have the good news, what is next? The last supper? Can I have dibs on your cd collection?" Well, don't start clearing off your shelves yet. I get to have BRAIN SURGERY! How cool is THAT?!? It sounds like a fairly non-invasive procedure: they go in through my nose, drill a little to get into the cave-like sinus cavity and go to town chipping, scraping, blasting, and whtever else they need to do to get rid of said tumor. I have to admit I was disappointed when the doctor told me they wouldn't require any shaving of my hair, but not suprisingly I'm ok that they don't have to spelunk through my grey matter to get this thing out either. I'll be in the hospital for about 3 days, and will be pretty unhappy with life for about 2 weeks after that. Everything should be healed up from the surgery after about a month, and then I'll have to be on some sort of hormone treatments to restabilize all of my hormones for some undetermined length of time, but not indefinitely. Assuming everything goes well - and there's no reason to think it wouldn't - this is not going to require lifetime medication or anything. Can I get an Amen?!

Seeing the head Endocrenologist at Stanford has its perks. Like, the fact that he knows the new head of the Pituitary department, new guy is one of the top 5 pituitary surgeons in the WORLD, has literally performed at least 5,000 of this exact same surgery in the past (seriously, I'm not even exaggerating here) and because he's new, his schedule is wide open and I could do the surgery next week if I wanted to. Convenient, but I'm opting for after my quarter at school ends and am waiting for the confirmation of the date later today. So far its looking like this is all going to go down on June 18th. Oh yeah. And I am SO taking next quarter off from school. I might be prone to overloading myself and misjudging how much I can handle, but even I'M not going to try and juggle school around brain surgery.

Back to the happy dance: even Husband has a spring in his step these days. We're both walking around with big grins, are both totally more relaxed, joke with each other more, and in general are just so incredibly happy to hear the news. I didn't realize how much this was affecting him as well. I knew he was being extra supportive on several different levels these days, but seeing him relaxed really shows how tightly wound he'd gotten. I'd forgotten how it felt to be this happy. I can literally feel happy coursig throug my veins. Ok, it was kind of subdued when I was jammong on that huge project this weekend, but the rest of the time, yeah. Don't get me wrong, I still sleep like ass, have had a headache at least part of the day for the past two days and am nowhere near fitting into any of my clothes. But they actually know what is wrong and can fix it now. I'm not (completely) crazy, and the end is in sight.

And its ok if you are jealous that I get to have all these cool things happen to me. I still like you. :)