Timeline and Update

Hi family and friends! For those of you that don’t know, Josiah was diagnosed with a brain tumor recently. It started in late June when he would tell me about these “episodes” he was having, which we now know to be seizures. He would get a metallic taste in his mouth, get a smell that smelled like spices, experience intense deja vu, and follow with a migraine. After several times of this same routine happening for him, he still hadn’t made a doctor’s appointment, so I decided to make one for him to a neurologist. The first appointment was early August. They gave him a medication to help with these episodes, and scheduled him for a MRI just to make sure there was nothing serious going on. A week later they called him in for the results and revealed he had a lesion (tumor) in his left temporal lobe. To say this was a shock is an understatement. Being a couple months out from the wedding, this wasn’t the news we wanted to hear. The doctor told us that these episodes he was having were seizures due to the tumor. He changed his seizure medication to something a bit more suited for what the situation was. (This new medicine drastically reduced his seizures.) His neurologist referred him to a neurosurgeon at Northside in Atlanta. They scheduled him for a more detailed MRI and a functional MRI early September where they would measure his brain activity through asking him questions during a MRI. When we got the results back from these MRI’s towards the end of September, we learned his tumor is about the size of a man’s fist. There is a spot in the center of the tumor that lit up with the contrast dye. This means it is either aggressively growing, cancerous, or both. The functioning MRI showed that a lot of his brain activity that would have typically been on the left side of his brain, was going on in the right side. This was a little good news to hear because not all brain activity with speech, name recall, and object recall was on his left side where the tumor is. The neurosurgeon strongly recommended we canceled our planned 3 week honeymoon after the wedding to schedule his brain surgery to remove the tumor. His surgery is scheduled October 16th at 11:00am three days after our wedding. More than anything we need prayers. God is good, and He knew before Josiah was even born that this would happen. It’s all in His hands. While we’re praying that God chooses to heal Josiah if this is His plan, we know that this isn’t always what He chooses to do. Please pray for Josiah’s doctors and surgeons. Please pray that the surgery goes well and for the unknown in all of this. Thank you for reading and for your prayers :)