As Arnold moves in...my hearing moves out.

Watching and waiting turned out to not be as agonizing as I thought it would be.  By the time I had my meeting with Dr. L, the Otolaryngologist at UCSF, it was mid march and four months had passed since my diagnosis.  With just two months left to reach the 6 month mark, it was not all that much waiting.
I had my next MRI on Tuesday May 22.  The results came in and the radiologist deemed it "unchanged".  Here are her exact words:

Findings: ...Again identified in the right internal auditory canal is an enhancing mass of 8.3mm transverse and 4.8mm AP, unchanged, consistent with an intracanalicular acoustic neuroma.

Impression: Stable 8.3 x 4.8 mm enhancing mass in right internal auditory canal consistent with an intracanalicular acoustic neuroma.

Remember my first scan measured: 8.3 x 4.5 x 6.1 mm, so of course the first question to pop into my head was, "What happened to the third measurement?"  Next I thought, "well, 4.5mm to 4.8mm looks like growth to me. "
To answer the first question, I e-mailed back to the ENT at PAMF, Dr. S, and asked him about that third dimension.  He was able to have the radiologist re-read the scan and she provided:

Addendum: The craniocaudal dimension of the right intracanicular acoustic neuroma is 5.8 mm

So, now I have a dimension, and it is smaller than the initial reading.  Immediately this tells me, two different radiologist I am going to get two different measurements. 
I sent a copy of my scans off to Dr. M's (neurosurgeon at UCSF) office and waited to see what he had to say.

In the mean time, I had another audiogram done on June 5th.  I very deliberately scheduled my audiogram to be done by the same doctor, Dr. K. 
In a nutshell, she said while I seem to be able to hear the tones about the same in the right ear as 6 months ago, my Word Recognition Score (WRS) has dropped to 0.

Just for fun, here is my first audiogram.  I circled where you can see my right side hearing is worse (the line is lower) than my left side hearing:

 

Here is my audiogram from June.  Though slightly lower, it is not considered a significant difference.

It took another month to hear back from Dr. M's office.  His letter said: 

There is no change in the size of a contrast-enhancing mass within the internal auditory canal.  I also have a copy of your audiogram from [6/5/2012] which shows that your word recognition is now a 0%.  This is not useful hearing.

From my point of view either document growth or loss of useful hearing are both prompts to consider treatment.

Again, Dr. M was very concise, one of the factors we were waiting for happened, my hearing is no longer considered useful.  Thus, he recommends treatment.  Again, I felt this was an answer, I should do something about Arnold, I need to consider radiation or surgery.
By now it was the middle of the summer.  When I think of summer as a kid, I remember what a fun and wonderful time summer was.  So now with my own kids, summers are meant to be fun and are the time to do and be with them as much as possible.  There was no way I was ready to think about doing anything about Arnold at this point.  
Then, come the middle of August, school would start up again and I remember what a very busy time that was last year.  I knew it would be somewhat easier with her going into first grade, no half days to start off the year.  But it would be busy with her birthday, then Halloween (my favorite holiday), then Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays.  I knew I would not want to do anything during all of this.  So, I figured I might as well wait and get another audiogram and MRI in November, when it will have been a whole year.