Surgery

I know how scary the surgery is. They found a 4cmx3x2 on my 29 year old sons left temporal lobe 8 months ago.  That day the doctors in the ER told us that the only thing they knew for sure was that it WASNT a Glioma because it didn’t have that appearance. They thought it was a metastasis from another part of the body. But when they did full body CT scan there was no cancer anywhere else. We did a biopsy and it was a high grade Glioma. We wanted to delay surgery but thank God we did it 5 days later because they were able to get 100% out (of course microscopic cells remain).  But if we had waited longer they probably would not have been able to get it all.  It turned out to be a grade 4 unmethylated GBM. I can’t tell you guys what to do. I remember when we were at the hospital with my son after he had the biopsy feeling like the decision was do nothing and lose him in 6 months or do the surgery that week and lose him in 5 days since there was a risk he’d lose his personality, his short term memory and his ability to speak and understand speech because of the tumor location. But God. He had a successful surgery with no side effects.  So all this to say that I know how scary it is and no one can say how his surgery will go but also that these doctors do know what they are doing.  If they are looking at it and seeing that it is a GBM or at least a high grade Glioma then I would believe it is. My sons was different because it didn’t look like GBM. But if it looks like it and there’s midline shift you may not need the biopsy. Finally my biggest advise would be to pray.  My son prayed with every single person on his surgical team. Every time someone new came to see him in preop he’d pray with them. We prayed over his surgeon. And I truly believe it was Gods presence in the surgery that made a full resection with no deficits possible because prior to surgery they had never even floated the idea of getting it all out because it was in such a tricky location.  In fact they had told us they wouldn’t be able to be too aggressive in how much they removed.  So sorry this is so long but my final advice would be if you can go to a major GBM center I’d do it there, though my sons was done in Chattanooga at a small hospital but the neurosurgeon had been at Vanderbilt before moving here.  So check where the surgeon in your town has been before.