Surgery Day is upon us!

Hey everyone!

So here we are again. Asking everyone to pray for Eli during a major surgery. I can’t tell you how much it means to us to know that so many people are mentioning Eli and Dr. Souwedaine by name to God. We appreciate it so much! The plan for tomorrow is to report to New York Presbyterian Hospital (across from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) at 5:30am for a 6am brain MRI. This is what Dr. Souwedaine will use as a guide to find this small spot on Eli’s brain. He will attempt to remove whatever it is that is on Eli’s brain and install an Ommaya port in Eli’s head (see yesterday’s update for pictures of what that will look like). Eli will recover in the PICU at NY Pres and we expect the recovery to take 3-5 days (obviously prayers for a quick recovery would be greatly appreciated as well).

Many of you that have been following us since at least October of 2007 will remember that I setup a special blog that I updated by sending txt messages from my cell phone every time I got an update from the surgeon. I decided to resurrect that page for tomorrow, but there is a twist. If you go to http://surgery.elihorn.com, you will see something called “Twitter Updates” on the right hand side. This is where the updates will be posted. This page is setup for those of you that aren’t already “friends” with me on Facebook.com. If we are friends on Facebook, just keep an eye on my profile because the updates I post to Eli’s Surgery Page are also going to be my Facebook statuses. If you send me a friend request (search for aaron@hornit.net), please be sure to mention that you follow Eli’s CarePage so I don’t hesitate to accept the request. During Eli’s tumor extraction in 2007, we were promised updates every hour or so, but for this surgery we have no idea how long it will last or how often we will be given updates. However, I do know that I probably won’t have time for a CarePage update until tomorrow night at the very earliest and I know that for many of you, that isn’t soon enough. So my quick txt message updates should help everyone know what is going on shortly after we know it.

Again, thank you for all of the e-mails, message board posts, and Facebook messages of support. This is the part we really count on everyone for. When you ask what you can do for us, this is what we ask of you. Thank you!