how many are dealing with an arachnoid cyst?

hi pat and thank you for the welcome and links. they are all good tho i am saddened that everyone is having to go thru this.i did have questions but a lot of them were answered as i read of each person's ongoing experiences. the biggest question mark in my life right now is finding a dr who'll acknowledge that a posterior arachnoid cyst is symptomatic. there are other question marks but all come back to how affected i am by this cyst. I am 53, married, a grandma, i daycare daily my 2 grandson, 3 and 7 months. my mom 73 lives with us. she is permanently brain injured from an awful car accident years back and does occasionally need overseeing but does pretty good most of the time. she worked as a special education teacher. taught sign language to the deaf, ages 3 and up. my husband job requires traveling a great deal 8 months out of the year and he is leaving tomorrow morning for the east coast for his job. so its me and mom. when i learned of this cyst and my husband asked me what i wanted to do? i told him i wanted to move back to calif for several reasons, the biggest being the knowledge that we needed to revert back to 100% health care insurance. i learned by researching these types of cyst that the symptoms i have are capable of increasing and becoming more varied until its removed. that and the location of this thing makes surgery even more dangerous. i am struggling almost daily with sensations of burning inside my head on the backk left side. there is always pressure that also extends down theleft side of my neck. the neurosurgeon i was sent to after this thing was found said to apply hot and cold packs to my neck. that the symptoms i described, dizziness, nausea, fatigue etc...can't be from the cyst as he felt the cyst wasn't large enough to be causing them. he did tell me tho that i would need to be monitered. so here we are back in calif, i'm loving being with my grandsons, that they are getting to be with their great grandma etc...my husband and i are taking it one day at a time and revising as we go how we will cope. so thats where i'm at for now. i've always made lemonade out of lemons, keep my perspective you know but i can definitely relate to some of the feelings described by maria, melanie and others. like any catastrophic illness, the knowledge of it has definitely realigned priorities. for me its making the most of each day and being there for others. and yes i want to connect with others. we need to support each other as much as possible. thank you again, lee martinez