Kelly Stafford Returns Home After Intense 12-Hour Brain Surgery

Kelly Stafford, the wife of Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, is home after undergoing a 12-hour brain surgery procedure for a tumor that doctors discovered earlier this year.

In an Instagram post shared to her account on Easter Sunday, Stafford revealed that she was recovering at home and “learning my new norm” after she underwent a 12-hour surgery that had initially been scheduled to last just six-hours.

Stafford had revealed in April that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and would be soon be undergoing surgery.

“This Easter is the beginning of a new life for me,” Stafford wrote alongside photos and videos from her recovery. “I wanna take a second to thank all of you for all the prayers. They have worked. I know they have. When they opened me up, I had an abnormal vein.. maybe abnormal for other neurosurgeons, but not the one We chose. He had seen it before and written a paper on it. That’s truly God’s work. The prayers for my family, I’m beyond thankful for.”

“A six hour surgery went to 12 hours and although they were anxious and scared, your prayers got them through. Thank you. Thank you so much,” she continued. “Now I am home and learning my new norm. It’ll take some time, but I really just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for all your support, thoughts and prayers. It means more than y’all will ever know.”

The surgery came just three weeks after Stafford revealed that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, sharing a photo of an MRI scan on Instagram with an arrow pointing to the tumor.

In the post, Stafford explained that she had “began to notice things” within the last year that she just assumed were a part of aging, including feeling dizzy and off balance and “things that I had been doing my entire life were now, all of a sudden, difficult.”

It was a spell of vertigo in January that finally pushed her to go to the emergency room.

“Matthew took me straight to the ER. They checked vitals [and] bloodwork, all were fine,” she wrote. “[But] several vertigo spells later, Matthew’s team doctor recommended we go get an MRI of my brain to rule everything major out.”

“I had a tumor sitting on some of my cranial nerves,” she wrote. “The medical term they used was an acoustic neuroma or vestibular schwannoma. All I heard was brain tumor [and] that they had to do surgery to take it out.. so that is what we are going to do [and] we believe we found the best doctor to do it.”

Stafford, a mother of three, added that she was “terrified” of the surgery and asked for “prayers and support.”