Wow, I feel pretty good for a dead guy!!! That is, basically, what the surgeons said when they saw my scans...I would never survive the surgery. On my last visit to my neurologist, I candidly said that it does not instill confidence when the surgeon says that he has never done this type of surgery before (my stroke was double sided, in other words it was not left sided or right sided, it was both.) My neurologist said that she was confident no one in DES MOINES had ever done that surgery before, and she was pretty sure no one in IOWA had done that surgery. The doctors gave my wife about a 50/50 chance of me surviving the surgery. If I survived the surgery, I had a 30/70 (about) chance of waking up, and if I woke up, I had of 0% chance of being the same.Well, 6 months later I feel as good as I have ever felt, and I do everything I used to, it just takes a little longer. I am encouraged every day, and I want to continue using my life to bring glory to God.
On December 8, 2008, my life changed forever. I had a double sided cerebellar stroke with 2 brain stem compressions. It was not until December 10, 40 hours after my stroke, that surgery was finally done to relieve the pressure. Dr. Piper, the neuro-surgeon from Iowa Methodist hospital in Des Moines, told my wife that surgery was nothing more than an attempt to save my life, but that it would not erase the deficiencies as a result of the stroke. Although she admits that she did not really understand what Dr. Piper had just said, my wife, Laura, agreed to the surgery and the care team performed a decrompessive craniotomy, to hopefully relieve the pressure and allow my brain to function somewhat normally. For those who have followed my blog for the last 14+ years, the surgery was successful, I returned to the church and I now live a relatively normal life, although I do have some pretty severe, though not always visible, defieciencies. I really thought that life could not get any worse th
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