The specialist appointment.

Jeff and I had been somewhat impatiently waiting for today. Unfortunately, I went to bed last night with a slight fever and feeling very fluish. I doubled up my vitamin D hoping that I would not be feeling too unwell to go today. Thankfully, I woke up not exactly feeling great, but with some Tylenol in me, I was OK. We dropped the oldest 2 off at the babysitter and headed out. When we got to Scarborough General it was so nice to see that we were the only ones in the waiting room and didn't have to wait more then about 10 minutes. They first gave me another hearing test and then we went in to see Dr. Niaberg.

He was a very nice doctor and already knew a lot of my condition from his discussion with our neighbour. He did run through my symptoms with me and then did a couple test. He had wanted to determine how much of my face was numb so took a sharp metal object and touched my face to see what I felt was sharp and what felt dull. Pretty much all my left side of my face and inside my mouth felt dull. Then the weird thing was he rolled up a Kleenex to a point and touched it to my right eye, which really hurt. When he did it to my left eye, he was able to tap it to my eye a few times. I could feel it, but it wasn't uncomfortable. He also made me follow his fingers and then as fast as I could touch my finger from my nose to his finger (which he moved about). The last test I had to do was tap my finger tips together as fast as I could. He told us that he sees about 1/2 dozen of these tumours/year and almost all of them have substantial hearing lose. He said that my hearing test, that they had just done, came back quite good. He is hopeful that this increases my chances of keeping a degree of hearing, which is so great. He said that it seems that this tumour is effecting more my balance part of my nerve then the hearing.

So next step is still that he will refer me on to the 2 guys at Sunnybrook. He said that this type of surgery is quite specialized and Sunnybrook is the place to be. He said it takes quite long to get in to either Dr. Chen or Dr. Nedzelski, but he would do what he could to speed up the process. When we got home I had to call his receptionist with some info about my family doctor and she said she was sending the information this afternoon but not to expect to hear more until next week. Dr. Niaberg also mentioned that since my last MRI was done not using the contrast "stuff" (not sure what it's called...and definitely not it's medical term) I would have to have another, but he would wait for Sunnybrook to do this for me. The reason they didn't use the contrast on my first test was because I was still breastfeeding. I have since weened Danica (such mixed feelings about that) so there is no problem moving ahead. Even Dr. Niaberg was happy to hear I had weened her. So, we now look forward to the next chapter.