Kaylie's Vocal Concert

Kaylie has been taking voice lessons for the past several months. Last week was her first vocal concert. She sang "Let it Snow!" and "There is a Place". She did a wonderful job! Here she is singing!

Here she is with her voice teacher, Stacy Rogers.

Here she is with her good friend Isabelle who also takes voice lessons from Stacy. Way to go Kaylie! You have a beautiful voice!

A Temple Visit

Kaylie and I had an early morning shopping trip on Saturday and we drove up to the temple grounds on our way. Kaylie said it had been awhile since she had visited up there so we wanted to go up for a few minutes.

Here is Kaylie with the Nativity Scene...

Kaylie wanted to take some photos of Mom too...

The Sacramento Temple is just so peaceful and beautiful....

There is my darling daughter....I'm so grateful for her, what a sweet spirited child she is. We had a nice visit to the temple grounds and a great time shopping at the outlet mall afterwards.

Holiday Festivities

Well Brain Surgery is old news! The holidays are here and our family has been having some fun!
Here the kids are getting ready to decorate the tree!

Yeah! It's all done....look how pretty! Now we just have to wait for the tree skirt to come--Mom finally ordered one after 11 years!!

Our ward Christmas party was last weekend and it was great food and company for all. I just loved this photo of Kyler and "His Friends" as he tells me!

Sunday evening we went caroling to friends, took cookies around and enjoyed driving around looking at amazing displays of Christmas lights. Here we are in mid "Wish you a Merry Christmas!" Wow..it was COLD and rainy that night!! Happy Holidays to all!!

Brain Surgery

Well I had Brain Surgery yesterday, as amazing as that is to think about! Everything went really well, I just have a very sore head!

This first photo is right after I got my head frame on. They put 4 shots in my head to numb the spots where the pins would hold the frame in. WOW..that hurt! Really, really hurt. When the Neurosurgeon tightened the frame with a screwdriver I just kept saying "ouch, ouch ouch" because the pressure on my head was so bad...even with local anesthetic! This plastic dome had holes in it and they did a lot of measuring by putting rods in the holes in the helmet.

Here you can see me with just the head frame. I wore this four about 5 hours yesterday. And it is only being held up by the 2 pins in my forehead and 2 pins in the back of my head....ouch.....and yes the pins are digging into my skin so if you are squeamish don't look too closely. Believe me..i could feel the pins digging into my head. But the goal was that the frame can't move..and once it was on..it didn't move!

This is the Gamma Knife machine and the headpiece that my brain went into during surgery. There are 201 holes in there and they had radiation beams coming into my head from those holes. See the metal slaps behind the headpiece?? That is where entire body went into the machine! Yep, it doesn't look very big but the table moved me into the machine for the treatment..pretty amazing stuff. Even though I'm claustrophobic I opened my eyes as I went into the machine. I figured, "How often will I get to have brain surgery? I need to just look and see what its like in here!" I was so proud of myself!! For my morning MRI I didn't take Valium this time--last time I did--so I'm feeling very good about conquering fears!

Here I am right before I went into the machine. You can see the physicist setting the final calculations for my treatment. After he was done I went into the machine once, came out to get different head brackets attached to my initial frame, and went back into the machine for more radiation. They treated the tumor in sections this way. After about 30 minutes of Gamma Knife Surgery in the actual machine.....my surgery was done!

Too bad it took 5 hours from start to finish........getting my IV/meds, fitting for the Head Frame, having the MRI scans done, waiting for analyzing of the MRI's, waiting for the team to draw up the plans for my treatment and then finally having the surgery done! I was so grateful to get that head brace off!! Wow!! I'm doing well though---still have a sore head, I'm sure that'll take a few days to ease up. All in all I'm doing really well though! Thanks to everyone for all your love and prayers!

Hugs, Heidi

My Blessings...

Need I say more???

Surgery is a Go for Friday!

Well we met with the Dr. Zusman yesterday and she is the Neurosurgeon for my Gamma Knife team. The board of doctors, scientists, etc. met and the vote was unanimous that the Gamma Knife surgery is the best option for me! Yeah!

So Friday morning I'll go in for this surgery. I'll be fitted for a helmet on my head, I'll go through an intense MRI screening. I'll wait while the scientists and doctors plan the attack for my tumor. Then I'll go through about an hour of intense radiation to the area. Within an hour of being done they send me home! It's an easy outpatient procedure!

I'll be a bit tired, nauseated for a day and then back to life as I know it! That's the miracle of this surgery. I'll have a follow-up MRI in 4 weeks to check the tumor. The goal is that the tumor will have not grown...if that's the case, the surgery will have worked well. Then at month two the goal will be to see shrinkage or signs of the tumor dying off. The entire tumor elimination process will take 6-8 months so we'll monitor things as they go along.

Thanks for all the support, prayers and encouragement! We feel very grateful that I get to have Gamma Knife Surgery! Yeah!

Good News on PET Scan

Well today I had a PET scan, which scans my entire body for 'hot spots' or spots of metastatic disease. My doctor called me back this evening with good news from the PET. Other than my tumor and a spot on my throat which they want checked out with an ENT, there weren't any hot spots to be found! Yeah! So I just need to have the throat followed up with, but the guess is that everything is alright there, they just want to doublecheck it!

Then in other news, the initial signs of the tumor in my head--which DID show up on the PET of course---is that the report showed slight signs of neurosis....in other words there may be some damage happening to the tumor already as a result of these steroids I'm on! I'll meet tomorrow with more doctors....but this initial news was encouraging! Yeah for the clean PET scan.....

Just wanted to share the good news... =)