Ray I cannot believe how many years you have had to deal with all of these symptoms. Maria, just wanted to let you know that I just saw a neurosurgeon at Weill, Cornell in NYC. His name is Dr. Boockvar and he has a lot of experience wth cysts. He typically does about 100 of these operations per year. His surgery is a little different than the one described to me by the neurosurgeon I saw at Columbia Presbyterian. He makes a small incision and goes in with a computer generated laser I believe and sort of filets the cell wall and drains out the cyst. Recovery time is only two weeks. The other surgeon does more extensive removal of the cell wall and the recovery time is 6 weeks. Dr. Boockvar's mortality rate is zero. He seems to believe that my facial and eye symptoms are due to the cyst pressing on cranial nerve 7 although I thought that cranial nerve 5 was eye related. Also, I did not ask him why or how my symptoms are definitely the cyst since it hasn't changed in size yet my symptoms have. Is this a typical thing of these cysts? I am going to e-mail him and ask him. He definitely said it's not my neck contributing to all this which my PT said could be possible. He said he wouldn't operate at this point, but would monitor me and my symptoms and to contact him if anything should change and I should have an MRI and audiogram yearly and that I could choose to have it done at Cornell. I really felt that he knows these cysts. He did admit that unfortunately, there is no hard medical data(enough cases out there that have been done) to prove that patient's symptoms are caused by the cyst. He said that it's all correlative. Basically, you know if the patients symptoms were definitively the cysts once you remove it and the symptoms are gone. I'm wondering if I should still send my stuff to Barrows for another opinion. What surgical procedure do they typically use for removal of these cysts and do you know their mortality rates for removal of the cysts? Hope you're feeling better and getting somewhere in the process of healing. Hope to hear from you soon.
Comment Reply
Hello Maria and welcome Ray,
Ray I cannot believe how many years you have had to deal with all of these symptoms. Maria, just wanted to let you know that I just saw a neurosurgeon at Weill, Cornell in NYC. His name is Dr. Boockvar and he has a lot of experience wth cysts. He typically does about 100 of these operations per year. His surgery is a little different than the one described to me by the neurosurgeon I saw at Columbia Presbyterian. He makes a small incision and goes in with a computer generated laser I believe and sort of filets the cell wall and drains out the cyst. Recovery time is only two weeks. The other surgeon does more extensive removal of the cell wall and the recovery time is 6 weeks. Dr. Boockvar's mortality rate is zero. He seems to believe that my facial and eye symptoms are due to the cyst pressing on cranial nerve 7 although I thought that cranial nerve 5 was eye related. Also, I did not ask him why or how my symptoms are definitely the cyst since it hasn't changed in size yet my symptoms have. Is this a typical thing of these cysts? I am going to e-mail him and ask him. He definitely said it's not my neck contributing to all this which my PT said could be possible. He said he wouldn't operate at this point, but would monitor me and my symptoms and to contact him if anything should change and I should have an MRI and audiogram yearly and that I could choose to have it done at Cornell. I really felt that he knows these cysts. He did admit that unfortunately, there is no hard medical data(enough cases out there that have been done) to prove that patient's symptoms are caused by the cyst. He said that it's all correlative. Basically, you know if the patients symptoms were definitively the cysts once you remove it and the symptoms are gone. I'm wondering if I should still send my stuff to Barrows for another opinion. What surgical procedure do they typically use for removal of these cysts and do you know their mortality rates for removal of the cysts? Hope you're feeling better and getting somewhere in the process of healing. Hope to hear from you soon.
God bless,
Debbie
August 4, 2010 - 7:07amThis Comment
Reply