Anna's Diagnosis

Yesterday afternoon Anna was diagnosed with a brain tumor located in her cerebellum (base of the brain) and extending slightly around the spinal cord.  She will have surgery tomorrow to remove the mass.  We will have more answers about her treatment/recovery and our family's plan on Thursday or Friday this week.

The purpose of this blog update is for us to tell the story once (instead of multiple times), to ask for specific prayer requests, and to provide a place for continuing updates about Anna and our family.  We know that other websites exist for this purpose, but since we have a family blog anyway, we thought this would be easiest.

First of all ... prayer requests.  Please pray that the surgery is smooth and successful tomorrow.  Please pray that Anna *feels* better soon.  She's been pretty miserable for awhile now.  Please pray that the course of treatment is clear and effective.  Please pray that Matt and I have strength (physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.) and wisdom during this journey.

Secondly ... Anna's story.  A little more than two weeks ago, Anna started complaining of headaches off and on.  No big deal.  We told her to drink more water, eat a better breakfast, rest.  At that same time, Matt came down with the flu.  He's was out of commission for about 4 days.  That Friday afternoon, Anna came home from school, had a snack, threw up, and went to bed.  She proceeded to have symptoms of a stomach bug the rest of the weekend.  By Sunday evening she was keeping food down, but just looked really tired and under the weather, like she had been fighting a virus.  She also complained of her neck hurting.  That symptom set off flags for us because it sounded like meningitis.  So last week Monday we took her in to the doctor for an evaluation.  They checked everything they could and said that she was fighting a virus and just needed to rest.

She rested the next day or so, but then started complaining of a sore muscle in her neck.  She'd had this once or twice before from sleeping in a bad position so we figured she'd just been lying down weird all weekend and got a stiff neck.

Anna went to school on Wednesday and Thursday last week, but still looked like she was fighting something, complained off and on about a headache, and still had the stiff neck.

On Wednesday, Kate and I came down with a stomach bug.  We both recovered pretty quickly, but this seemed to confirm that Anna had been fighting the same thing over the previous weekend.

We decided to take her back into the doctor on Friday morning about the sore muscle since it didn't seem to be getting any better.  Friday morning she vomited again, but seemed fine otherwise.  The doctor diagnosed her with torticollis this time (really tight neck muscles) and gave us lots of strategies to help loosen things up.  We worked really hard on Friday to help the muscles loosen and were making progress by the end of the day.  Saturday morning she vomited again so we took her back in to the doctor.  A new doctor diagnosed her with a sinus infection and started her on a round of antibiotics.

After that, things deteriorated for Anna.  Her vomiting increased, her headaches returned, her fatigue increased.  Sunday morning we spoke with nurses on the phone and they said that it would probably take 2 to 3 days for the antibiotics to kick in.  Until then, treat it like a sinus infection.

Anna actually perked up for a bit on Sunday morning, played some games with me, asked to eat, just generally hung out for awhile until she got tired and took a nap.

Then things really went south for her.  By Monday morning we were concerned about dehydration so we took her into Urgent Care.  This whole time her balance seemed to be getting worse, but we just thought she was having a hard time because she'd been lying around so much and was generally a sick kid.

The Urgent Care doctors were worried and started talking to a neurologist.  They sent us to St. Mary's Hospital for an MRI.  The MRI clearly showed the tumor as well as fluid building up inside her brain since the tumor is blocking the normal flow of spinal fluid.  We were soon transferred to UW Children's Hospital.  All day yesterday Anna was going downhill.  The neurosurgeon decided that Anna needed to have a ventricular vent (I think that's the term) put in to release the pressure, the sooner the better.

Anna had the procedure last night, as well as a long MRI to give the neurosurgeon a plan for surgery.  Her surgery is planned for tomorrow morning and will last most of the day.

Random facts ...

This has nothing to do with her Lyme diagnosis last summer.

We have no regrets about the decisions we made during the last two weeks.  We have full confidence in the doctors who met with Anna last week.  We place no "blame".  Even the pediatricians who worked with us a St. Mary's yesterday admitted they would have done the exact same things that we and the other doctors did.  Besides, knowing a few days sooner would not have changed much in terms of the diagnosis.

All of the doctors, nurses, medical personnel with whom we have worked in the last 30 hours have been amazing.  Anna could not be getting better care anywhere else.

This is the most common kind of brain tumor in children, which means that there is a lot of information about how to treat it.

As of this morning, Anna was doing better than yesterday since she's not REALLY sick, but now she is sick enough to be miserable about it.

This type of tumor is not hereditary.

There are no known causes for this kind of tumor.

My parents are staying with us to help out with Kate and Ethan.  Kate just knows that Anna is really sick and needs to be in a hospital.  She and I will be heading over there to be with Anna this afternoon.  There are lots of resources at the hospital to help siblings understand and cope with this kind of thing.

We have already had many offers of help and we sincerely appreciate everything that people want to DO to help.  I know ... I'm a doer, too.  Right now, we just want prayers.  The more the better.  God listens.  We've already had answered prayers.  Now we know what's wrong and we know that it's treatable (there were actually worse things this could have been).

On Thursday or Friday we'll have a better picture of where we go from here and will have a better sense of what we need as a family.  I'll try to update this blog when we have more information at the end of the week.

I'm hoping that we wake up soon and realize that this has all been a really, really bad dream.