The facts of Achmed

Over the past week, I have had the "privilege" of telling and emailing a large number of family and friends about my new opportunity. After the initial shock has worn off (for me that took about 4 days) everyone wanted to know what the hell it was I had and how am I feeling.

It is a perfectly natural reaction to want the answer to these questions when a loved one has news such as this, but I gotta tell you, if I have to scientifically explain my situation one more time... that ball in my head just might explode. I studied business, I work at business, I live and breath everything business... I am a capitalist. I can probably tell you how much it is going to cost to fix my little friend and I can also give you a pretty good idea of my productivity rate for the past month because of him... but I can't even spell half the words that I have read this past week, much less pronounce them!

But to be completely honest, as an extremely non-scientific person, I can probably give you a relatively decent explaination of my opportunity as I have read approximately 18000 medical journals in one week. Perhaps my talents would have been better spent at med school afterall!

This is the coles notes version of Achmed:

University of Minnesota has a great site for basic info: http://www.med.umn.edu/otol/library/aneuroma/

Acoustic Neuroma Association of Canada (ANAC)
http://www.anac.ca/

As you have probably guessed from the websites that I have listed above, Achmed has a name, Acoustic Neuroma. It occurs in about 1 out of every 100,000 people and it is a benign (non-cancerous) brain tumor. The main symptoms are: loss of hearing; loss of facial control; and loss of balance. If treated early, it IS NOT a life threatening tumor.

Achmed is classed as a large- medium sized tumor. He is 25 mm (1 inch) in diameter and is predominately affecting my auditory nerve with some minor pressure on my facial nerve. As of now, it seems that my balance has not been effected... and yes, it seems that he has been detected realtively early.

Over the next couple of weeks I will have a lot of information to add here and I hope not to confuse you all as much as some of it confuses me! I wanted to get this blog started and let you all know that I am doing fine. I am healthy, strong and positive, so I don't want people to worry about me.

If you are going to think about this at all, think positive energy towards mankind in general, in particular the thousands of people around the world who have been given this opportunity to overcome adversity and are not blessed with all the positive things in their lives, which I am very fortunate to have.

From Achmed and Me... Live Life!