Meet Arnold

Meet Arnold.  He is an acoustic neuroma. 
He is a small tumor about 1cm big that has lain waste to the "useful" hearing my right ear.  Useful hearing means I can not understand what people are saying in that ear.  I can still hear sounds, but they are muffled and distorted.  So, really, what I hear is not very useful.

I found Arnold on the MRI I had on November 22, 2011.  On that scan, he measured 8.3mm. The above picture is my MRI scan from November 23, 2012.  Here he measures 12mm.

A diagnosis like this raises so many questions and so much anxiety.  As I was working through this process of discovering my Acoustic Neuroma and what that means for me and my life, I found I did not want to talk about it much.  I was so overwhelmed and shocked and it seems so unreal since I can't just look in a mirror and physically see the tumor.

I am right now 9 weeks away from having surgery to hopefully evict Arnold from my life.  I've found that talking about him to people just does not easily come up in after school or play date conversation.  When I do talk about him, I feel that there is so much that I do want to say and explain that a simple conversation or e-mail does not do it justice.

I also do not want my friends and family to feel I've been keeping this big secret and that I do not want to talk about it.  I've been living with this for over a year now, so I have accepted it and can easily talk about it. 

I also thought this might be too much information and maybe a little to heavy for facebook.  So, I will attempt to join the blogging nation and explain and summarize my own Acoustic Neuroma story.