A long day

This morning I was at the hospital at 8, so I could talk a little bit more to Helen before the surgery. She had already gotten a mild sedative and was starting to get drowsy.
At 9.20 they rolled her away into the operating theatre.
The neuro surgeon had told us that if the surgery went without complications it would take 2 1/2 - 3 hours.
So I waited, with Helen's parents and her aunt Cooks, and it is such a difficult wait.
Lots of terrible worrying, a desire to have this over and done with, you don't want the operation to take much longer than anticipated, but you also don't want to see the surgeon come towards you much earlier than expected.

In the end the operation took only just over 2 hours, there was very little bleeding, and they managed to find the affected area easily. They got a sample of the central tumour, and the removed some of the surrounding swelling that were interfering with the nerve leading to the left side of Helen's face. In a few days we'll get the results of the testing of that tissue, and then we should maybe also start to see if some of the symptoms are reduced.

And then we'll see if they want to do any further surgery, or whether radiation will be the next step.

About an half hour after the operation ended they let us in to see Helen for a few moments. She was awake, but quite drowsy. They had to cut through her muscles in the back of the head which means lots of pain after the surgery, so they were giving her great amounts of pain killers.

Helen's mother took the below picture

After that we went home, and I had a great long nap, I haven't slept that well in a long time.
In about an hour we'll go back to the hospital and see her again :)