I’ve started having facial spasms and strange heavy feeling in my head. Sort of feels like my head is going numb. Just weird!! My Dr. doesn’t seem too concerned, but it doesn’t feel right to me.  Anyone have strange feelings in their head after GF? My tumor is only 7.3 mm. 

Thanks!

Hello,
  Hopefully someone can help. I just pulled a muscle in my back and was wondering what is safe for us to use. I had GK about 5 1/2 months ago. Last I remember they said no NSAIDS but I am not sure if that was only afterwards or for life.
Thanks for any help!

Just wanted to offer a follow-up from 9 months out. Someone messaged me about the rest of my recovery, so I'ma paste here my message to them:

Hey, sorry for the slow response. Just to clarify, first: Dr Friedman was always for the retrosig approach.

Re: my post-op experience, as I wrote in my initial post, the first 12 or so hours just sucked. The walls kept slipping and sliding across my field of vision, and the vomiting was both frequent and projectile.

That said, I started recovering quite quickly. By the time I left the hospital (3 days post-op) I was walking around quite well on my own. My first day out of the hospital, my fit bit informs me that I walked just shy of 10,000 steps — the result of an extended walk to a taqueria near my airbnb. At that point, I was basically fully mobile, and by a week out, I was averaging over 10K steps a day, with the SoCal sun and heat more of a problem than my actual surgical recovery (we were pretty far in from the coast and temps were in the high 90s). By two weeks out, I was regularly walking over 20K steps per day and felt comfortable driving and getting on a bike. Bike riding posed some minor balance issues initially (basically, looking over my shoulder was disorienting), but that faded within the first couple hours of returning to riding.

I probably could have driven a car pretty much as soon as I left the hospital, but my family was around to give me rides and not many places to go, so I played it slow and safe — no need to dance with the devil if I didn't have to. I did experience some mild vertigo occasionally while driving for the first couple-few weeks  — but I was basically 100% behind the wheel within, say, 3-4 weeks.

I did physical therapy for a few weeks, which was helpful with keeping my already-quite-limited vertigo in check, but I stopped going before the end-of-run since my symptoms were so mild, and my therapist was clearly running out of stuff to tell me other than 'keep doing the same thing.' That's not meant as a slight to my therapist, who was great. Since then, my vertigo has remained mild, but it does worsen slightly if I spend too much time at my desk (talkin' like 50 or 60 hr weeks) at which point a make a point to get up and about or to resume some of the PT exercises.

I've also started, in the last couple months, to get brief, but occasionally pretty intense headaches if I'm exercising in a way that leads to my blood pressure rising quickly. Deadlifts are pretty much right out, and I image that if I tried to hang upside down it would probably start sucking pretty fast, but I'm a 42 year old man who no longer spends all that much time playing on jungle gyms, so that doesn't really come up very often.

My hearing is pretty much exactly as it was when I went in for surgery (moderate loss in upper registers in one ear), for which I am profoundly grateful. Truly, one of the great wins of my life. I love music and listen to it pretty much constantly. I'm so happy that I can still enjoy (almost) every aspect of it. I did get a hearing aid, and it's helpful, tho I found it rather irritating at first, but if you wear it for a few months, your brain really can adapt to it, tho it can be a cacophonous journey to get there.

All in all, I'm tremendously lucky and deeply grateful — to Drs. Friedman and Schwartz and the whole UCSD team, to my employer for giving me good health insurance and ample time to recover, for my family for supporting me, for my friends for emotional support. My outcomes were basically as good as I could possibly have hoped for. I know that's not true for everyone (especially on the boards here, which understandably tend to foreground people with complications), and I try not to forget how lucky I am or to undervalue the hard work of those who helped me get here.

Greetings B Matthew-

I was in my 50s for diagnosis - decided on Gamma as my initial treatment. At the 3 year post MRI - Gamma was determined to be a failure. So I had surgery translab at Mayo.

Post surgery there is a new normal. Hearing was already gone on tumor side so that was not a big deal.  I feel that I am doing great now.  I have not slowed down.  I figured out new/different ways to address any issues I run into with what I want to do.  I work on balance daily.  I have worked my way into standing on one leg to put my socks on.  It takes longer but I know its better for me. People ask why not sit down to do it - but I want to keep challenging myself!  I do vestibular exercises daily on my walks. I had a lot of support from family and got great advice through the forum.

Please know that a lot of people come here if they have issues, so it may be skewed to that direction.  Its not all wine and roses, and everyones circumstances are different.  I feel blessed.

If I can share one part from "Don't Worry" by Shunmyo Masuno that I find meaningful (and read over and over) -

In Zen we say, "Every day is a good day."
This is not to say that life is a succession of good days. 
There will be sunny days and rainy days.  Sometimes you'll be able to bathe in that gentle sunshine, and other times you'll need to bear up against the cold wind.  But no matter what, you will gain the invaluable experience of having lived that day, and it will become precious to your existence.  The Zen interpretation of this is that all days are significant, and therefore there is always good to be found.
Your circumstances should have no influence on the way you live your life.
The way you live your life will affect how you perceive your circumstances.

Wishing you peace through your journey!

Hello all.  I've just landed on this forum and it's a bit terrifying scrolling through the Post-Treatment forums and reading a lot of the thread titles.  It seems several posts are not  very positive and it appears a lot of people are looking for help/feedback due to having bad symptoms post surgery.

I certainly don't want to freak myself out by reading about all these negative experiences as my anxiety has already spiked from reading just a few threads.  So I figured I would start a thread that's dedicated to success stories and positive experiences after having AN surgery.  To someone like me who's just landed here, I would consider positive experiences to be when active people are able to get back to their regular lifestyle and feel mostly "normal" again after surgery.  Success stories would also mean you aren't dealing with serious balance issues, fatigue, vertigo, wonky-head, depression, foggy head, lightheadedness, memory loss, etc. that is negatively affecting your lifestyle after AN surgery/recovery.  I realize life will never be the same again, but I'm hoping there are many stories of people getting back to close to where they were before surgery.  Is it possible that a lot of people who don't have lingering issues and are able to get back to a "normal" life within 6-12 months don't post here?

I'm sure there has to be success stories here so it would be great if people could post links those threads here as my goal is to build a consolidated list of positive threads to read for encouragement.  It would also be great if any of you who feel pretty close to "normal" again after AN surgery could share your stories in this thread, even if it's already been posted elsewhere.  This would be great for people like me who just arrived on scene to read some encouraging stories all in one place instead of trying to search for them amongst all the scary thread titles.

I'm a very active 50yr old male with a ton of hobbies including surfing, snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, motocross, 4-wheel racing, and golf.  I'll be looking to remove my AN with the retrosigmoid approach soon, and I'm hoping to read stories of other active people out there like myself who were able to got back to doing the things they love, and live a "normal" life again after surgery. 

Your positive feedback and encouragement is much appreciated.