Hi Lynn,
Sorry to hear that your AN might have come back but only time will tell for sure. Hopefully, your scar tissue will turn out to be only that, not the tumor. The real scar tissue, I was told, does not grow. Tumor, on the other hand, does. Another great thing is that most ANs grow very slowly and the growth is even slower or nonexistent in males over 60, so you might not have to do anything about it again, just monitor it with periodic MRI. Should you need treatment, chances are that it might be in a few years and options will be even better than they are now as medicine gets rewritten every 5 years or so.
I had surgery for a huge AN in 1988. Scar tisue with no mass effect was found 7 years later. 3 years after that this "scar tissue" grew and became a small tumor. I watched and waited for 9 more years and finally decided on the surgery again which I had last year in June. I also found that times have really changed! The surgeries became infinitely better (speaking from experience), there are different forms of radiation available for small to medium size tumors and information as well as support can now be easily found on the Internet.
During the years of my wait and watch, I visited a lot of doctors and found that sometimes the most brilliant surgeons do not have the skill of patiently going over the options and sorting among them. In addition, they do not like to do it because insurance does not reimburse them more for long appointments. I also discovered that my options are severely narrowed as opposed to the newbies with the same size tumor despte the fact that I live in an area where great neurosurgeons are not in short supply. I do not know anything about Stanford in terms of following and monitoring but House in LA follows a lot of patients even from a distance , and probably does the most recurrences than anybody in US. They do overwhelmingly surgeries, though, and just last year they purchased a GK machine and started doing this form of radiation.
Good luck and please keep us posted!
Eve
