CapnGnarly

It was pretty surreal for me. I found out on Friday, September 5, after having a seizure on my back deck. I was taking some stuff out to my car, as my family was headed out for the night. I went into my seizure, my wife called an ambulance, my neighbor cleared my back fence to come help, and the rest of the night was a blur in the emergency room.

I remember the docs wondering why I had a seizure, and they ordered a CT-Scan. Following that, there were some anomalies they wanted to see closer, so into the MRI I went. After the MRI, my first neurologist came in and calmly explained that there was a diffused mass in my front right lobe, approx 5 cubic cm. Swelling and inflammation around that is what caused the seizure, and I'd need to have the tumor removed quickly to avoid any more problems.

At first, it was too factual. Just information for me to parse and sort. One moment, I'm a 29-year-old husband, father of 3, full-time employee at a great place, and in the next moment, I'm a dude with a brain tumor that gonna have my head cut open.

I am a man of faith and family, and my focus very quickly turned to that for strength and stability. I have twins that well be 3 mid October, and a 5 month old baby boy. I'm very new to the dad job, but I love it and want to keep doing it forever. The thought that my kids could be robbed of one of the greatest joys I could give them sucked, and I knew that it would be by faith and family that I would pull out of this no problem.

We got in touch with a phenomenal tumor surgeon from UW Madison Health, who thankfully took my case. By Wednesday, I was on his office and had surgery booked for Monday morning. My prognosis has always been positive, and hearing people say "for having a brain tumor, this is the best case scenario" is still strange.

I went into a four-hour surgery on Monday morning, and following a post-op MRI, there appears to be no more tumor, no sign of stroke, just some swelling from the surgery. Km exhausted as all get out and look forward to drug-induced sleep, but take what I can get. My family and support group has astonished me throughout this last week, and I can't even begin to explain how much that helps.

If you know someone about to go through something like this, do ANYTHING no matter how small for them. The littlest things have been life changers this week, and we won't forget a moment.

I think I did. One of the crazier parts of the story is the timing of the seizure. Two minutes earlier, I would have been in my family room putting shoes on my kids, freaking the he'll out of them with no help from my neighbor. Two minutes later, I would've been behind the wheel of a car with my entire family riding along for that adventure.

Luck (or a higher power of some kind) definitely pulled some strings for me this week.

Buy me a beer sometime. Anything helps.

I'm quite attractive in my hospital gown...

Today was a lot of work. The staff in the nuero ICU here at UW wanted me up and about pretty fast today. Food, walking, seeing family, rounds, etc.

I'm exhausted, but I've been hitting my recovery benchmarks like a boss. Every check box checked, I feel better and know I'm one step closer to being back on my couch or back in the office.