Lucky

It's been a little over a week since we first found out that Holland had a Posterior Fossa Tumor (a week ago we didn't know the type - that it was a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma - which is an "ideal" type of tumor because it's benign).  Today I started looking up information about these kinds of tumors and it's made me realize how lucky we actually are.  Obviously, having a tumor is not ideal.  But, the location of the tumor and the type was ideal.  I've briefly read a few stories of other kids who were diagnosed with the same thing and they've had a lot more complications - some couldn't get all of the tumor out because it was located too close to the brain stem, or they had a malignant form of a posterior fossa tumor and had to go through chemo and/or radiation, and they had many more complications like not talking for months (which could have happened with Holland - the tiny part of tumor that is still left in her brain is actually in the area that has issues with cerebellar mutism where kids won't talk for months).  Some of these kids also had issues with balance and coordination like not being able to walk or stand.

We are so lucky that we haven't seen any of these things with Holland!  She is walking fine and we haven't really seen any problems with balance and coordination.  Besides the generally grumpiness of post-operation pain, the only issue we have noticed is that she tends to slur her speech sometimes, especially when agitated, and her "normal" talking voice has turned nasally.  But we talked with a speech therapist at the hospital yesterday and she said that this type of thing is common with all of the drugs that she's been on and even just with being in the hospital environment, so it should hopefully go away within a couple of weeks.  It already seems like it's gotten a little bit better just since we've been home.  So even if her nasally/slurred speech is a cause of having 2 brain surgeries, I feel like it's something that we can easily deal with - especially given the fact that she's still pretty young so her brain is fairly elastic at this point and could compensate for it.  We have to go back in 2 months to do another MRI and see what the remaining piece of tumor looks like.  We will be praying everyday that it just goes away (which is a possibility if the blood source has been cutoff).  If not, we'll have to reevaluate at that point what to do.  If it's staying the same size we might just be able to monitor it.  If it's getting bigger we'll probably have to do a 3rd surgery.  So we'll see what the next MRI looks like, but at this point we are feeling very lucky and we're thanking Heavenly Father a lot - we know that this whole thing could have been much worse!