I was diagnosed with a medium (1.6 cm) acoustic neuroma the day before Thanksgiving. I am 58, in excellent health, and absolutely did not want to "wait and watch." At first, I wanted nothing to do with a radiation treatment, so I went about consulting with surgical teams around the country (if you want to know who and what they said, email me personally) with the idea of getting the tumor into a different zip code. I was flying back from a consultation really feeling glum about the time in the hospital, the recovery time, the likelihood of losing my hearing (I still had 96% word recognition in that ear.) I was awaiting a call from Dr. Melvin Field in Orlando. I had sought him out as he trained in a method of open surgery that seemed to be less invasive. When he called the next day, he said I was making a mistake by having open surgery. He told me that my neuroma was the perfect candidate for radiosurgery. It was still relatively small and it was not touching the brain stem. He also said words that changed my path forever. He said "If there is one kind of tumor you want in your head, it would be this kind. It won't cause any harm as long as the growth is stopped." I would have gone to Orlando and had him do the gamma knife but he said they did great work in Pittsburgh and that was much closer to my home in Columbus, Ohio. He mentioned specifically a Dr. Dade Lunsford. As I researched the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), I found many interesting and provocative things. First, they were the first gamma knife center in the US. Second, Dr. Dade Lunsford is the Co-Director of the Center for Image Guided Neurosurgery and the Lars Leksell Professor of Neurological Surgery. (Lars Leksell, by the way, is the inventor of the gamma knife.) Third, the UPMC is the ONLY center in the US that has the new Perfexion Gamma Knife. All these sold me on UPMC and Dr. Lunsford.
I sent my MRI pictures and other test results to Dr. Lunsford and we set up a consultation. The consultation was Monday January 14 and we were both satisfied, so the treatment was set for the next morning- in the new Perfexion. Everything went well- I don't remember much about the day, just snippets. When Dr. Lunsford came in to talk to me and my wife, he said that everything went well and if she would do all the driving, we could drive on home to Columbus that same day. It was great sleeping in my own bed that night!
I am almost three weeks out and everything is going great. I have set up my six month MRI and consultation for July and I am going back to Pittsburgh because I like and trust Dr. Lunsford. I realize it is too early tell the full result, but doing it on an outpatient basis and being back to work the next week sure beats the 5-6 days in the hospital and three months recuperation- not to mention the loss of hearing and the likelihood of losing the hearing.
Go to
http://www.neurosurgery.pitt.edu/imageguided/index.html to read more about the University of Pittsburgh and their Center for Image Guided Neurosurgery.
By the way, the folks at Pittsburgh told me that the biggest advance in the Perfexion Gamma Knife is for cancer patients with multiple tumors. The 4(C) model would have worked just as fine for me.
