Just want a bit of binary decision making

I had a consult at the Gamma Knife centre for the treatment of my acoustic neuroma or vestibular schwannoma. Why can't this be easier?

While I know I mightn't (and most likely won't) need treatment for a few years, I am trying to do my research now to get a bit of relief from the dark cloud following me about. If I knew how I would handle the situation, I would hope I could forget about this sucker.

The Gamma Knife is a radiosurgical procedure in which high energy radiation rays are aimed at the brain tumor from many angles in a single treatment session. It doesn't require any conventional surgery and the recovery is pretty much immediate.

However, there are unknown risks - this is a relatively high dosed radiation aimed at my brain. While the technology is not new, it wasn't originally used on young patients who were good surgical candidates so not a ton of long term safety.

So, my consult provide the following information:
- the tumor will kill my hearing in my left ear
- the Gamma Knife will only speed up that process
- my tumor is small - I should just forget about it and wait for it to grow/cause symptoms
- brain surgery is no laughing matter, it is very serious
- the centre has one malignancy incidence that they attribute to the treatment, but the risk is very low
- the rate of complication is very low - related to the frame (immobilize head during the radiation shot) and impact on the trigeminial nerve (which seems pretty horrible) [I don't believe this at all - complications can be severe with time off work, steroids to minimize swelling - but again is somewhat rare.]
- it could be so much worse - which I agree, coming from a radiation oncologist, a benign tumor is pretty low risk - but it is a big deal to me.

So, not liking this at all. I am pretty frustrated. I should get a consult with a neurosurgeon sometime in the next 6 months. My follow-up MRI and hearing test are in late May so I will at least get an idea whether this sucker is growing.

To be honest, I hate this.