Any dizzy and balance issues should ultimately go away since surgery involves cutting the balance nerve. As your tumor effects the balance nerve, the signal from that nerve gets weaker. For example, my balance nerve was at 50% a few months ago when I had it checked. If I get surgery, it will be 0% when I wake up. It will eventually go down to 0% or close to it if I don't get surgery. Either way, it will be at 0% some time in the future. As the signal from the bad side gets weaker and weaker, your brain learns to compensate with info from the good side. If the bad signal gets weaker a little at a time, you won't have much in the way of noticeable symptoms. It's the sudden drops that make you sick and dizzy.
Mine has been getting weaker gradually and not caused me much problems. Maybe a half dozen times over the last ten years it has had sudden drops in performance that made me sick for a day or two. I call these "attacks" and I just take valium and/or antivert along with zophran to get through them. I've been told if I get surgery, my balance symptoms should be minor because my brain has done so much compensating already and my balance nerve is so weak already.
As for hearing, I agree with you. Keeping your hearing is not something to look forward to. If it still works, great! If it doesn't, you won't be all broke up about it because it's not like it was going to work no matter what you do.
The way I look at it, age and tumor size are the big factors. This is just my personal opinion mind you, but that is what I am using to guide my decision making. How big is your tumor, and what does your treatment Dr think is the point where it's size becomes a risk factor? How old will you be when your Dr thinks age will be an issue with surgery?
Mine is 1cm, so I have a lot of leeway in terms of growth before it gets "too big". I am 48. My Dr says that 58 is plenty young for surgery. So, in my case, using my criteria, I have plenty of time to observe MRI's. I told my Dr I wanted to go 10 years and he thought that was pretty much not going to happen. He also told me he would not get surgery now if he were me. So, somewhere between "not now" and less than 10 years is my mid term planning.
You are 59. Does your Dr think that being 65 significantly changes your odds for a good recovery? Do YOU want to be 65 and be recovering from surgery? At 65, you might be more interested in radiation. Radiation might be more sophisticated in 6 years than it is now. When you are 65, if your tumor hasn't grown at all, you might want to just keep WW'ing. At some point, with advanced age, if the tumor hasn't grown, the odds of it never growing go up, so you may NEVER need treatment.
Sorry, I don't have an easy answer, no one does. All I can do is describe my thought process which, if you ask me, is brilliant! For me, for now, I am just going one MRI to the next and hoping I can reach the point in my life where my kids are off to college and I don't have to work anymore.
