Welcome to Lake Weiner

Today we spent the morning at Children's Hospital in DC. We were there so Evan could get an MRI done prior to his next set of appointments with the team at NYU Hospital. We'll be up there in a couple weeks for appointments and some extensive testing, but NYU didn't have an MRI opening until May so we had it done locally.

One of the pretty cool advances in medicine comes in the form of digital photography. While Evan was sleeping off the heavy dose of drugs they gave him for the MRI, the nurse called the digital lab to request a copy of the scans for us. We walked to the lab on our way out and the CD was waiting for us!

Of course, we came home and popped the CD in a computer to look through all the images of Evan's brain. It's amazing to see. In November, Dr. Weiner told us that the opening left from the abnormal tissue he removed would fill with brain fluid and the brain may even spread out a little to fill the space. If a lot is removed, there will still be extra fluid and we lovingly refer that that part of Evan as Lake Weiner. Although after looking at the MRI images, it may be more like a river or stream, check it out...
You can clearly see the horizontal-ish white area where Dr. Weiner removed all the nasty bits. Evan also has metal plates on his head and I think one of them can be seen in the uneven area on the outer surface at about 8:00. Again, this is Rob's and my MRI report, so take all of this with a grain of salt!

If you are geeky like me and want to compare to the MRI done right after surgery, you can see it at this old blog entry:

Medical Maze: Brain Invasion

Overall, Evan did really well today, although he had some anxiety about being at the hospital. He was afraid he was going to have another surgery and even Aria was concerned that we wouldn't be home tonight. Clearly, we have to do a better job with our explanations. Evan seemed much better once he was convinced this trip didn't involve surgery and started noticing that he was hungry. We told him he could have a popsicle after he woke up from the sedation and the boy never forgets anything -- as soon as he opened his eyes he said, "Can I have a popsicle now?" What a trooper!