Yvonne Foong: Fighting NF

I regret this lack of updates. But it is because I have been occupied, reading about my brain tumors. There could be more risk involved in removing the left ventricular tumor than I thought. The surgeon in Singapore who evaluated my scans and patiently explained them is an excellent surgeon. But even he advised against surgically removing this tumor. He said that doing so would make me lose my right visual field at least. And he was right, so we need to find a surgeon experienced with this particular region of the brain.

On the right is a top view of the brain. The lateral ventricles can be seen in the center. It looks like two sausages forming an X. There is a better illustration in my General Psychology textbook but I’m too lazy to scan it so let’s use this one instead.

The visual tract passes through the lateral ventricles. It enables us to pick up and understand what we see. A left homonymous hemianopia, or in other words, damage to the left visual field, is illustrated in the picture below.

Source

Homonymous Hemiapnopia is just one of the many risks in transcortical approaches – surgery that cuts through the brain cortex.

In this article, the authors outline numerous risks of complication following ttranscortical approaches to lateral ventricular tumors. It is written by Professor Richard Ellenbogen, chiarman of the UW Neurological Society. With his experience, Prof. Ellenbogen gives this surgery a low 10% risk

For those who do not want to take that ten percent risk associated with the transcortical approach, a team of surgeons in Phoenix, Arizona, invented the Contralateral Transcallosal approach to Lateral Ventricular Tumors.

This approach goes through the Corpus Collasum (see first image), the part that joins both hemispheres of the brain, instead of going directly through the brain cortex. Prof. Ellenbogen also mentioned this approach briefly in his article regarding the transcortical approach.

So which option should I opt for? We shall see about that soon, but definitely not three tumors at one go. Partly because the third tumor might be more dangerous, but is still small and might not require immediate attention.