Pathology

Quick side note: I am so grateful that people enjoy reading the blog, since it's really therapeutic for me to write, and it helps me share in a way that feels not-too-overwhelming.

Before I share the results, some background information about meningiomas...
If you look back on the original blog post where I mentioned the meningioma, you might recall that I said that they are most often benign but occasionally not. To expand on this, they rate these tumors on a scale of Grade I to Grade III, with I being - by far - the most common and totally benign. IIIs are "vanishingly rare," as my doctor put it, but also aggressive and malignant. As you might expect, Grade IIs are in between those two extremes; they are described as "atypical," neither benign nor malignant, but with the potential to become malignant, and a higher likelihood of recurrence. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine: 78 to 81% of meningiomas are Grade I, 10 to 15% are Grade II, and 1 to 4% are Grade III. 

The whole point of the surgery was to remove the meningioma, both to ensure it is out before it creates neurological problems and to test the thing to figure out the Grade. Once the Grade is known, we can figure out the next step in the treatment plan.

So, drum roll please... It turns out, that my meningioma was a Grade II. 

I'm still working through my feelings on it all. It's not exactly bad news, but it's definitely not good news either. Honestly, I think I kept forgetting about the pathology part. There was so much anxiety and turmoil wrapped up in "BRAIN SURGERY" that it was easy to put aside the fact that the surgery was not necessarily the end of the journey. I think I was also leaning heavily on the numbers, assuming I'd be in the majority and all would ultimately be fine, because to consider otherwise felt too scary, too daunting, too far down a weird-ass rabbit hole. But now, here I am, not in the majority and not quite sure how I'm feeling. Today, right now, it feels like a potent cocktail of relief at having some answers, freaked out by what some of those answers are, and nervous at the remaining uncertainty.

Anyway, what does all this mean for now?

• I'll be having MRIs every three months or so for quite a while. Eventually we'll scale back to yearly, but I'll need to have them for the rest of my life. 
• If a meningioma recurs, it should be caught quickly enough that it can be dealt with via radiation instead of surgery.
  
• Radiation would be, in my very crude understanding, a targeted zap - not chemo or a lengthy whole-body thing; any side effects would likely be localized to around the area of the zapping.