If life is a highway... I'm road-kill.

As if Tyler needed to remind us that he is still driving the bus, we are re-established as a NICU family. According to Sharron it's like old home days up there, everyone stopping by to say hi. I have found myself rather sick, and banned from the ICN (and any proximity to Sharron). It is most likely the virus that we all thought was food-poisoning when it hit those few unfortunate souls at the beach last week. I will spare you the gory details and say only that in 8 hours I have gone from queasy to empty. Most of the mental images you have now are likely accurate.

From what I can tell the plan is to watch Tyler closely looking for any neurological signs of distress, and bump up the Full MRI and Surgery to early this week. As a direct result of Tyler's uncanny ability to avoid a shunt (3 tries so far), the Neuro team wants to fenestrate the cyst. The two possible routes that were explained to us were fenestration and shunting. Shunting is "easier" to do, but more likely to clog or need follow-up work. Fenestrating is just a $4 word for perferating. The Cyst is nothing more than a collection of CSF (Cerebral Spinal Fluid) that got trapped in the wrong place. Fenestrating it will allow the fluid to drain and prevent it from collecting again. The catch is that it's harder to get the equipemnt into position to do the job.
The Cyst is in a really lousy spot. Smack between the Cerebellum and the Brain Stem.

The hope is that the full MRI will give them the data they need to program a robot to do the actual work. They call it Image- Guided Neurosurgery. As a parent with some robotics background I say cool! except for one catch. In adults they literally screw a frame to your head (with real screws) so when you have the MRI you then have reference points that the robot can use to know EXACTLY where it is. The issue is that Tyler's head is too flexible for that kind of frame to stay in place. It turns out that they use the same setup used by video-game designers to
capture motion of a subject. They place MIR visible stickers on a few spots on his head and run the MRI, as long as the stickers stay put the machine will know exactly where it is and according to some reports be able to deal with some flex in his skull.