Thursday Night, April 22

We carried Collin up to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit after the MRI. The PICU is a large room with about six beds in the center of it and some other more isolated rooms on either end; one nurse is assigned to each bed. As we walked to the crib that would be Collin's, we passed by other sick kids, most of them babies. Having never been in a PICU before, I was not prepared for the sights and sounds we would experience and I was scared, but I tried to just focus on Collin. Eventually the neurosurgeon came to talk to us; he let us know that he would be performing the surgery to remove the tumor from Collin's brain the following afternoon. He told us that based on the MRI it didn't look like the tumor was attached to the brain stem at all, which meant he was optimistic he could get the whole tumor out. There was the possibility that after the tumor was removed, he would have to either place a temporary external ventricular drain (EVD) or a permanent shunt that would enable Collin's cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) to drain out of his head so that it didn't keep accumulating and cause increased cranial pressure, or hydrocephalus. He had not yet looked at the pictures of Collin's spine, but would let us know the following day what they showed. He expected the surgery would take four to six hours, and he told us where we could wait so that he could come and talk to us after the surgery. That night, I sat next to Collin's crib and dozed when I could. I was terrified to leave Collin's side; I didn't want him to be afraid if he woke up and didn't see me. I remember watching the little baby in the crib next to Collin's, and feeling sad for him that his parents weren't able to be there with him around the clock.