Bon Voyage, Jessye, and visit from Michael

At 12:15, Sandro came to take Jessye to the airport. It has been fantastic having her here for two weeks - she and Sophie have kept Rosie's spirits up during the long haul and Jessye has done special duty as Rosie's sleepover buddy.












At about 1:00, Michael and David came to talk to us. Michael said that the remaining AVM was in a critical part of the thalamus and he would not want to take any more of the thalamus out surgically because of the unacceptable risk of harm to Rosie. He was sure that he had gone to the limit of what surgery could do for her and that none of his respected colleagues anywhere in the world, including Robert Spetzler in Phoenix, would consider doing more.
He thought that her two surgeries removed the risk of hemorrhage in the near future and that there may now be a role for Gamma Knife, a radiotherapy technique. We already discussed this possibility at our early consultations and knew that Macquarie is the only place in Australia with Gamma Knife. In fact, I had already been in touch with John Fuller, who is the Gamma Knife guy here, through a connection with a good engineer friend in Melbourne who is working on pioneering equipment with one of the Macquarie surgeons.
Michael talked about the international leaders in this technique in Pittsburgh and at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and said that Macquarie has connections with both and that they regularly confer about cases in the planning stages of treatment. We'll talk more about that later.
Michael would like another comprehensive MRI of the thalamus done tomorrow and then we'll proceed with talking to John Fuller later in the week.