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Life

How Are We?

Hey all,

It’s been awhile since we’ve provided any update. Obviously, we’re all dealing with a new normal, so we hope everyone is safe and healthy.

Amie had an MRI yesterday—yes, April 1st, and it wasn’t a joke. I drove her to the hospital at 9AM, dropped her off, and found a spot on the empty streets, parked, enjoyed 1934’s A Thin Man and some classic Jazz—Davis and Coltrane, not Kenny G.

Amie entered the hospital and was screened for COVID-19. Some of the attendants thought she was an employee (don’t know why, wink!). But she had her temperature taken, scanned, and went down to the MRI screening room.

90-minutes later, Amie left the building and I picked her up. We had a scheduled video call with her doctor, John Hensen, at 11:30AM to go over the scans. So, we drove over to Marmite restaurant where we had preordered a take-away lunch to make it convenient when we were done with the video chat.

With the video call itself, all-in-all, Amie is doing well. The scans still show the hole in her head where the tumor lived. Dr. Hensen noted that it should continue to shrink over time, but said most likely the brain may never fill back in fully. More good news is that she is able to remove 2 of the 3 medications from her daily routine. Yay!

Mocktails

There is bad news though… Amie can’t have adult beverages for a YEAR! This is due to the third medication she is on to prevent seizures. So, we’re going to research some classic and discreet mocktails for her to enjoy. We don’t know if it’s a year from yesterday’s scan, or from her pre-op date, December 22nd. Let’s hope for sooner than later.

Again, we hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during these quarantine days (weeks?) ahead.

All the best.

Tim, Amie, Remi, Butch, & Squeak

Categories
Life

Out Staples. Out, I say.

Hey all—

We had one of our follow-up appointments this past Monday.

The exciting side of the visit was having the staples removed from Amie’s head. I was expecting her to have a raised ridge line from the healing, but it was perfectly flat. 28 staples removed and a baby-soft fuzzy strip of hair where the incision site sits from only 2 weeks ago.

The 28 staples out of Amie’s head.
removal
Staples being removed, one by one.

We were able to catch up with Litvack and his team, Mohab and Nicole. We received updates on the medication Amie is taking and the expectation as to when she’ll stop taking some of them or transition to an oral alternative.

From what we uncovered, the medical team did discuss Amie’s particular case during the morning’s Tumor Board meeting. We figured they glanced over it last week as it was known to be benign and not as emergent as compared to other patients’ during that review.

From looking at her scans, Litvack has asked to send along two sections of the tumor for genetic testing. By doing this, they hope to find information that might help with looking not only at Amie’s particular case in more detail, but let us know if she’ll be susceptible to another case in the future. Let’s hope not.

During the Tumor Board meeting, Dr. John Hensen, Neuro-oncologist, was interested in Amie’s case. So, Litvack introduced us to Hensen and he met with us for 40 minutes to hear more about Amie’s history with her leukemia as a kid and the symptoms we had noticed over the last year that might have been directly related to the meningioma.

All-in-all, we had a very productive appointment and I earned a few beers from Elysian while we enjoyed a much needed lunch out of the house.

Much love,

Tim, Amie, Butch, Squeak, & Remi