Well, my october 10th appointment has come and gone.. what a crazy day.  Had to be at the hospital at 8AM and it was a marathon all day.  First I had my pre-operative scans including the screening ones to see if the stuff had spread.    That was 2 hours of waiting for 10 minutes of scanning :)  From there, up to the surgeons office for my preop with him, Dr. Werning is a very busy guy, but very experienced with Skull Base surgery so that’s good.  He explained that they will be removing some bone at the back of my sinus to allow access for their endoscopic tools.  The surgery itself he explained is relatively straightforward except for its close proximity to my corotid artery, because of this he has Dr. Lee, a Neurosurgeon, to also participate in the procedure.  It was Dr. Werning that gave me my first bit of good news in a while, my screening scans are clean.  After all that went down I had to go to UF admissions and do all the pre-screening to make sure anesthesia was good to go and pay my money to be admitted to the hospital on the 20th.  Looks like i’ll be there for a couple days before being allowed to move out of the hospital to a local hotel for a day or so longer.   Man, all this for a biopsy, what’s the procedure to deal with the actual disease going to be like?

Not much of an update really, but I did find out my pre-operative scans and doctor visit are on October 10th and the biopsy surgery will be on the 20th.. looks like I’ll spend a night in the hospital on biopsy day.

In late 2008, after some time and some tests it was confirmed that I have a form of cancer known as Chondrosarcoma.  It is a skull base tumor which is basically at the dead center of my head.  From time to time i’ll post here with what’s going on and just how things progress from diagnosis to treatment.

This is a scary time for me, but thankfully I have some great doctors at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida and great family!

Today I finally heard from the doctors at Shands with their ‘plan’ for my treatment.  I will need a head and chest CT (the chest is to screen the rest of me to see if anything spread) and then a series of meetings with surgeons and doctors that will explain what they are about to put me through :)  The head CT is aimed at the area of my sinus to give the surgeons a better picture of where they are about to go.

The first actual invasive step will probably come in 2 to 3 weeks when they do a Trans Nasal Endoscopic biopsy, which essentially means they stick a camera and knife up my nose and go get a piece of the action.  This will be under general anesthesia and probably mean 1-2 weeks of down time to recover.

For now, that’s all I know until I get dates and times for all the things they’ve suggested.

Here’s a short video made from a DVD made from an original VHS tape by Tim Skelly during the development of many prototype games. I clipped the Screw Loose specific footage out for this vid.

Once again gameday came and went and I couldn’t make it I absolutely must make it there one day as not only is the arcade cool but so is Peter and the charitable work makes it all the more worth it. Sounds like once again everyone had a blast!

Peter Hirschberg’s Luna City Arcade

Major Havoc is one of those games I really loved as a kid. I played this one so many times I couldn’t even begin to count in the original dedicated form. The Gold Mine arcade in the Lake Square mall in Leesburg, Florida always seemed to get oddball games that would eventually become rare and collectible. Read the rest of this entry »