3 days out

I'm three days away from my first and hopefully only brain surgery.

All going according to plan I'll be having surgery at some point during the day on the 27th of October.

I figure I should begin with some background as to what's happening. A few years ago, coming back from a party, I fell off my skateboard and got a fairly serious concussion which landed me in hospital. As part of that I ended up getting a CT scan to make sure nothing particularly major had occurred. During the CT scan the hospital found a colloid cyst (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloid_cyst) between the 3rd and 4th ventricles in my brain.

For the last 2-3 years I've been having MRI scans on a semi regular basis (every 6-9 months) to see if the cyst was getting any bigger. If it got any larger it had the potential to cause hydrocephaly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus) leading to permanent damage. This is because it would have blocked the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid between the 3rd and 4th ventricle.

A few months ago I was booked in with the neurospecialist who was dealing with my case. After a long discussion he suggested that sooner rather than later was the time to have it out. He specifically said that if I was 50 he wouldn't have bothered but as I'm 23 that now was the time to have it out. I don't want to collapse on vacation or some remote village in Europe...
There are some potential risks involved certainly, a 3% chance of unspecified complications, presumably memory issues given that the cyst sits near the amygdala and the foramen of Munro which are both involved in short term memory processing.

However, leaving it in is another 3% risk of it swelling and causing issues. In which case I'd have to get surgery to have it out anyway, another 3%. If I remember highschool maths rightly you multiply the percentages in this case and end up with 9% chance of serious complications. So I'd rather have it out now than risk it causing serious damage at some unspecified date down the track.

Still, I'm pretty nervous. I figured I'd write this all down since I wasn't able to find any particularly useful resources online. Hopefully other people will read it and get a better idea of what it's like.
I plan to continue posting after surgery, assuming I'm able to concentrate enough to write or that there haven't been any serious complications.

If you have any questions please post them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.