Today was our appointment with Dr Bruce with the idea that he would look Alexander over and then we’d head off to be admitted for the night before surgery the next morning at 1130. Of course, it could be argued that we were checking to see if Dr Bruce had grown since we saw him last in November…
Dr Bruce’s position on the growth charts looked OK and Alexander managed to do something he’s never done before…do a seizure right in front of Dr Bruce! We might have set the bar a bit high…he might expect us to be able to produce another on demand but we’d just as soon not do that!
Originally, we were planning for two surgeries…one to lay down a grid of electrodes to do an internal EEG to see where the hot spots are and then go take the grids and the hot spots out with a second surgery. We actually have three potential options that are in play depending on what Dr Bruce encounters in the operating room:
- Original plan of two surgeries
- Removal of a hot area immediately with no grids
- Removal of a hot area and grids left in for further monitoring
We think the third one is the most likely because no one really wants to do more surgeries in the future if we can avoid it. But we’ll find out soon enough.
We were planning on Alexander being admitted and staying overnight for a morning surgery but we found out that we’d have to return to Virginia overnight and return in the morning due to insurance reasons. I’m sure we could have argued it but at that point it wasn’t really worth it.
So downstairs we go for a lot more hurry up and wait at the lab where the paperwork sat in the bin for about a hour before the blood was drawn for the pre-operative tests. A good sign was that his vein was pretty easy to find and draw blood so hopefully he’s recovered from last year’s adventures in burning veins.
Once the blood was finally drawn, we were on our way back to Falls Church / Annandale to the Ronald McDonald House. And yes, I blew the turn on US-50 near Arlington Cemetery again and went back to Abe’s Place. Maybe the third time will be the charm…