at least it's not brain surgery

thoughts from November '06

Jimmy is 5 now. He has already had some of the side effects from the radiation they did last year for his brain tumor other side effects will take years to show up. One of the side effects is that the bone on the side of his head has died and is being re-absorbed by his body, this means he has no skull on one side of his head. If that is what radiation did to his skull I don’t even want to know what did to his brain.

We need to do some surgery to fix his skull. They are going to take the bone from his forehead and split it in two and put half back in his forehead and put half on the side of his head. It will be the fourth time he will have surgery on the same spot, plus they will be cutting open the top of his head too.

I was actually handling this news pretty well until the Dr. mentioned that Jimmy would probably be in the ICU for 3-4 days. I just don’t think I can take the ICU again.

Jimmy lost half his hair from radiation, just on the side and back of his head, unfortunately 90% of the hair that he lost never grew back. So now Jimmy is bald on the left side and half of the back of his head. His hair was finally getting to be long enough to do a 6" comb over to start to cover his bald spots. Now they want to shave his head. Jimmy was just as upset about that as he was about having another surgery.

It is strange how we get upset about different parts of the same horrible thing. Oh well, as my husband says "at least it's not brain surgery".