Wednesday April 4th, MRI

The doctors sedate Ingram to do an MRI of his head and spine with and without contrast to get the best images possible of the tumor. They come back to us with the scans that afternoon and show us the tumor and talk more about medullablastoma. The concerns they have are that it might be connected to the brain stem and the cerebellum and that it’s starting to cause hydrocephalus, which is fluid on the brain. They are able to see blood vessels that they’ll need to work around and they can see the areas where they believe it’s attached to the stem. The brain stem controls all of your gross motor skills including walking and talking and is very delicate. They have to be very gentle with it and cannot be rough with it like they can be with the cerebellum. They were explaining the risks and all the different things that could happen as a result of it being connected with the brain stem and we were all praying that it wouldn’t be attached. Of course we were thinking that with as big as it was it was most likely attached and they would end up having to leave parts of the tumor on the stem so as to not damage the stem. After the MRI that morning, Ingram began taking steroids to control the swelling and, oh, what a bear he was being. He has a lot of energy anyway, but now his energy had been given an attitude and an appetite that we were having a hard time controlling. Luckily, there was a phenomenal playroom at the end of the hall and he would play in there for an hour or so at a time with folks that were visiting because our small hospital room was not enough to hold him in. He quickly found out how to get whatever he needed and proceeded to chase his nurses down in the hall to ask for things like popsicles, juice, more popsicles, and butter. Yes I said butter; he decided that he needed more butter for his potato Wednesday night. Since his nurses get everything else for him, he figured that they should get him butter too. Unfortunately, they didn’t have butter on the floor but promptly asked if he wanted another popsicle so he started walking with them to get another one.



"I need some butter"