Hi Everyone. I am a 29 year old male from NYC and around 3 months ago I found out that I had a acoustic neuroma. It was an accidental finding. I was having pain in my neck for a few months, so I got an MRI and they found the tumor. It was relatively small, around 1.4cm at its largest point. When you looked at the MRI, you could tell that the bulk of the tumor was in the canal, and the head of the tumor started poking out and heading towards the brain stem. My biggest concern (like most people) was saving the facial nerve. I would have given up the hearing in the ear in a heartbeat if I knew that my facial function would be saved. I read online (btw, I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, so I looked online very little, as I didn't want to freak myself out) that the facial nerve is left unscathed in 95% of cases and hearing is more 50-50 (assuming you have a good doctor). I interviewed 3 doctors: Dr. John Roland in New York City at NYU, Dr. Derald Brackmann in California at the House Institute and Dr. Thomas Wilcox in Philadelphia, PA at Thomas Jefferson. Obviously we needed to decide not only where to get the surgery but what surgery to use. In the end, I went with Dr. John Rolan at NYU. For starters, he has done over 1,000 of these surgeries and every ENT doctor we asked in NYC told us that they send all their patients to him. It is also amazing how many people actually have an acoustic neuroma, so we found around 5 people that have used him personally and were all very happy. Also, was the closest to home which is important for follow up visits and I felt better knowing that my doctor was a 30 minute drive away. I chose to do surgery over radiology. To be honest, I didn't really research the radiology all that much, but I spoke to a few doctors and being that I am only 29 years old, they didn't feel I should risk getting any rays close to my brain, as I am still relatively young. I think that if I were in my 50's or older, I may have looked into this a little bit more. My surgery itself was on February 27th. It was a 3 hour procedure (very fast) and I was in the hospital for 4 days. My face looks great and my hearing is still unknown (it is still relatively weak, so it looks like I will have some hearing loss in the ear). The worst part of my hospital stay was the steroids. For around 2 days I was going stir crazy in my hospital bed and then at home. I felt like I wanted to move around all the time, even though I really couldn't move all that much post surgery. 2 weeks later, I am sleeping great and starting to walk around the house pretty normally. My face looks great, hearing still pretty weak, and my dizziness is getting better every day. All and all, I am very happy with the results so far. I expect to return to work (or at least start working from home) in about 2 weeks.
