Amanda is out of the hospital!

The hospital is a 24 hour operation that at any time of the day or night, nurses and doctors are coming in poking, prodding, and making new assessments about your progress. This is the scenario that we became accustomed to living with every night. Suddenly, last evening, the neurosurgeon resident decided to take out the spinal tap and monitor Amanda closely to see if the leak was indeed closed.

Late today, and to our surprise, they decided to release her from the hospital. Staying in the hospital bed was only going to cause other problems in the long run. So they decided this was the best diagnosis. We were obviously elated to finally get outta there!

We are taking baby steps. We moved into a temporary home a mile from Stanford Medical Center (just in case something would happen in the next two days) and let her get a breath of fresh air, a new environment and monitor her progress, before we head home to San Francisco.

Her orders are to move very gently, no sudden head movements, or picking up anything that weights over five lbs., i.e do nothing that will endanger the leak from springing again. Just walking seems like a victory for her. And we are talking maybe ten minutes at a time, at a snails space. Her brain is trying to figure out what happened to the other side - and at times causes a great deal of havoc with loud internal sounds, headaches, and nausea when she moves in a certain way or has too much stimuli. This is what will take time, retraining her brain to accomodate the loss on the right side.

I know that her positive spirit is due to each of your kind thoughts and prayers, motivating emails and text messages. After all, we are all Ninjas!


Love, Amanda's Mom, Sharon

October 16th - Tuesday - Update

Amanda is still in the hospital and her family is with her 24 hours a day. They are still monitoring the brain fluid leak.

The brain fluid leak, a known risk factor from the surgery, is something that happens to one in ten patients. It occurs possibly when the multiple layers of skin are sewn together after they extracted the tumor, or when they patched the hole in her skull, they didn't put enough in there and a leak occured. Whichever of those scenarios happened, the process is to follow the lumbar spinal tap procedure to keep the presssure down from one's own brain fluid and away from the leak so it can heal.

This is imperative so that infection does not set in, and not to go back into surgery to repair the leak.

On the bright side, Amanda has a lot to be thankful for: the entire tumor was removed so she doesn't have to go thru a radiation process and her face function is normal!! Thank you God.


They told us that there would be hills and valleys with respect to the progress of her recovery, we are now in the valley. She is determined to get thru this. Tomorrow is another day! Keep up your good thoughts, and prayers, as I believe this is keeping her strong.

Best wishes,

Sharon Lewis