So this is me...

 This is me after my 3rd brain surgery to remove the meningioma which had grown yet again, and far sooner than expected.

I was warned going in that I could have a brain stem stroke - or even die during surgery. But I was in such dire and almost constant pain that the risk was worth it. As it happened, when the team looked at what was there, they realised how close I was to death. Without the operation I had a couple of months left at most.

The op was 15 hours and required 2 surgical teams - one for the ear and neck, the other for the skull base. It was the 1st time that this kind of op had been done in its entirety. My excellent South African skull-base neurosurgeons looked very grave and did not want to take on the surgery. I think they were thinking palliative care only.

So hats off to the UK team at St. George's Hospital.

By the time of my op I was hardly sleeping. Pressure and pain would build up in my head every time I sat or lay down more than 30 to 60 minutes. I would also get spasms in my right leg. All this was relieved only by my walking or standing for up to an hour. Pain killers did nothing. My nights were a long round of poor sleep and walking off the pain. 

The good part of it was that to distract myself from the pain (when it wasn't too bad) I did a lot of crosswords, sudoku, word puzzles and colouring in. So at least I spent my time usefully.

My days were spent in trying to catch up on sleep...

Over the last few months before the op, I lost weight precipitously. I knew from past experience that I would lose a lot of weight very suddenly when the tumour started growing, so I tried to put on a bit extra - quite an effort, given my eating problems - of which more later. In a matter of months I lost nearly 10 kg. Part of this was due to my eating getting worse again. I had swallowing difficulties due to the tumour strangulating the right vagus nerve. Eventually, I could only slowly and carefully eat liquid food with no bits in it (even tiny bits could choke me). Eating every mouthful was a balancing act between getting enough nourishment versus the risk of choking to death or aspirating food or liquid and getting pneumonia.

At the same time, my voice was disappearing (again, the vagus) and my face, which had been going into spasms on the right, instead became paralysed on the right.

So I was more than ready for surgery. That said, I didn't really believe that I'd have a stroke. After all, I'd lived a healthy life and had none of the risk factors for a stroke...