Update on My Brother

The past 48 hours have been quite stressful.

Back in April I wrote briefly about my brother and how he had suffered from sudden paralysis of his legs.

When he was taken to Bangladesh, he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis. He was given an aggressive treatment of steroids, and he started physiotherapy. His recovery was slow, but he was recovering.

Suddenly last week, he lost sensation in his left leg. He said it was dead weight and he just couldn't move it at all. Having exhausted all the treatment options in Bangladesh, my parents and brother flew to Bangkok for further investigations.

The arrived on Tuesday and my brother was immediately admitted to the hospital. On Wednesday they did an MRI and discovered a mass growing around his spine (from T5-T10 so it was quite a big mass). On Thursday the doctors said that the only option at this point was to remove it. So this morning, he underwent surgery.

The surgeon managed to remove the entire mass. It will be a week before the lab results from the biopsy are back; however, they are confident that it is not a malignant tumor.

We still don't know what caused it, whether it will return, or any of those details. We'll know more over the next few days.

My brother is doing alright. He's in the ICU and will be for a day or two. As you can imagine, it was quite a procedure that took several hours. I'm just happy he got through that part -- hopefully he'll be able to focus on a full recovery soon.

I've been feeling so restless here. I feel so distant and far from my family. I'm thankful that I can speak to them regularly, but still. Thinking of my parents and brother in a foreign country where they don't know anyone or the language makes me feel anxious. I may fly over there -- but I have to get a visa before I can do that, so nothing has been confirmed yet.

I'm just thankful that the surgery is over. Definitely missing my family a lot these past couple of days.