Kelly Stafford, wife of Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, revealed Wednesday that she will be undergoing surgery to remove a benign brain tumor.
“I am terrified of them opening my head, I’m terrified of losing my hearing, I’m terrified of losing facial function, I’m terrified of far worse things that could happen,” she wrote Wednesday in an Instagram post.
“I am telling y’all this to ask for prayers and support.”
According to her post, Stafford started noticing symptoms such as dizziness but thought it “was just me getting older.” In January, she started experiencing vertigo spells. Eventually, a member of the Lions’ medical staff recommended she get an MRI.
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“A few days later we were hit with the results,” she wrote. “I had a tumor sitting on some of my cranial nerves. The medical term they used was an acoustic neuroma or vestibular schwannoma. All I heard was brain tumor & that they had to do surgery to take it out.. so that is what we are going to do.”
According to Mayo Clinic, acoustic neuroma is a “noncancerous and usually slow-growing tumor that develops on the main (vestibular) nerve leading from your inner ear to your brain. Branches of this nerve directly influence your balance and hearing, and pressure from an acoustic neuroma can cause hearing loss, ringing in your ear and unsteadiness.”
Matthew Stafford was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2009 NFL draft. He met Kelly Hall while they were students at the University of Georgia, and they married in 2015. They have three daughters — twins Chandler and Sawyer, 2, and Hunter, born in August.
Chuck Schilken is a sports reporter on the Fast Break team. He spent more than 18 years with the Los Angeles Times’ Sports Department in a variety of roles. Before joining The Times, he worked for more than a decade as a sports reporter and editor at newspapers in Virginia and Maryland.
