My Birthday - the short version

I had a fun birthday! I got lots of gifts I wasn't expecting - like spending the whole day with Mark in the hospital (at least we were together!) And well wishes and visits from people I know and love, but don't always see. 

Yesterday afternoon - after my 16 week OB checkup (everything was fine there) I noticed Mark was acting and talking weird. He speech sounded kind of like his tongue was swollen. Upon further questioning he couldn't remember much of anything recent - what he had done that day, who had stayed with us that weekend, what day/year it was. It took him a full 2 minutes to come up with our kids' names, and when I pointed at Annie (the baby - for now) and asked him who she was, he just stared at her with a blank look. So ... I drove him straight to the ER (Doug was there and about to leave, but awesomely volunteered to stay and watch the kids for me). The ER did all kinds of tests to check for a stroke - EKG, CT, Angiogram, Chest X-ray, I think - and came back with "It's not a brain bleed, but there is a growth and he needs it checked out before he can leave." The growth is large, without any kind of decent explanation from anyone official, the ER doc made a circle with his hand about the size of the long way around a cutie orange (or maybe as big as a small apple - I confess, I might not have been paying as much attention to that as I could have been - I was a bit distracted). He did say that the CT made it look like it wasn't the aggressive type of growth (that could change with further testing, but I'm taking that good news for now! :) )

We talked to a neurosurgeon, he scheduled an MRI - we've had that done and will get the results in the morning when he comes in. All he was really able to tell us without the MRI was that on the small-medium-large scale, it's definitely larger. And it's on the right side of his brain and seems to be growing in the center of his brain and working it's way upward. We'll know more in a few hours...


(I had this up on Facebook, but decided my in-laws might be scandalized by how much info I was sharing so publicly - so I took it down and decided to put it up here.)