My Wife Needs Neurosurgery (Brain Surgery) scheduled for Tuesday May 28th, 2013

Tiffany has been diagnosed with Chairi malformation, where her cerebellum tonsils in her brain are partially below her skull and are causing her spinal fluid not to flow correctly. Chairi Malformation surgery is considered brain surgery even though the doctors should not get "near" the brain compared to other brain surgery.  Although, the doctor's will do a craniotomy to expand the area under the skull by using cow parts and then reattach (sounds simple, but you know it is brain surgery, therefore, it is more complicated than that).

Anyways, this isn't something that just appeared, they say she was born this way.  Research doesn't know why some people with this malformation have issues and others doesn't.  They also don't know why it appears randomly throughout life.  But Tiff has had problems with balance all her life, and within the last 5 years she has really had difficulty with virtigo.  And recently she started having more frequent and longer lasting headaches.  Last week, she spent a week in the hospital due to it, where they decided to run lots of tests (thinking she maybe had lymes disease, but the official test came back negative).  Luckily for us, they requested a neurosurgeon to review her MRIs and he found the issue.

The risk isn't as high as Noah's neurosurgery was, but the recovery will be, and it maybe longer due to the location of the incision.  She'll have a week of recovery in the hospital, and an additional 4-6 weeks at home with recovery.  After that she'll be off a total of 3 months from work due to her responsibilities (childcare).