November 14, 2009

• Surgery Recap and Update

    

  Posted by Sammy

  Saturday Afternoon from MD Anderson

  Just for the record…

  This is us:

  

  This is Cancer

  

  Guess how the fight ends for cancer.

  So surgery #4 is done. Steph is recovering nicely. Were about 48 hrs out as I type this. She was up to walk 4 times yesterday and once or twice so far today. Pain is getting better. Its pretty low aside from some chest tube discomfort as she sits, worse when she walks but that all is nothing unexpected. She is on solid food now and we are hoping the chest tube comes out this afternoon which would mean that the catheter would follow suit tonight or tomorrow. (likely tomorrow since the epidural has to come out some time before the cath)

  Surgery day went smoothly overall, with the only exception being some pain issues overnight. We checked in and eventually went back to pre op which seemed to me, at least, to go faster than in the past. Once they wheeled her back I went and grabbed lunch with mom and settled in to hurry up and wait. The MD Anderson guest wireless network was giving me fits so it was hard to update but I got a few on so hopefully everyone wasn’t completely in the dark that day. If you’ve never been here, everything is top-notch…except the wireless network which is pretty terribad. So terribad in fact that we usually have to type these posts into a word document and paste them to the blog. But I guess if youre going to skimp somewhere in a cancer hospital that’d be where. Its really ok for most people, just if you’re full of geek-dom like me it’s irritating. Anyhoo we went back to see her after surgery and there was pain as usual but she was much more alert which was good. Ill let her describe the sensation of being woken up after surgery to your surgeon running down how everything went rapid-fire but im sure that’s quite the experience.

  We got settled into the room by around 10pm and set in for the night. The problem we ended up having was that we would doze off and she would not be able to push her pain medication button which was where the morphine was coming from. So the longer she slept the more pain she would have when she woke up. So we ended up getting the level of pain mediation delivered with each push upped a bit along with another shot to help with coverage. The lovely side effect of all the morphine which covered her pain was some nausea though she hasn’t to this point actually thrown up so really its been pretty controlled. We did manage to get some sleep, which is actually incredibly difficult in the hospital with all the people in and out and things like that.

  Yesterday she improved over the day and I took mom to the airport to fly home. I head back tomorrow and spend Monday getting things taken care of at home before I go back to school Tuesday. Steph should be discharged sometime this week and home by Thanksgiving. Really things have gone pretty smoothly. Going to Galveston the day before surgery was a nice thing. On the way back we saw some guy totally fail at many life tasks…among them being wealthy, use of a cell phone, driving and owning an expensive car by driving his rare $1 million Bugatti into a swamp.

  

  Bugatti FAIL

  I think its Karmic payback for driving a car who’s price tag could feed a small town for a year or two. Read the story here

  Lastly we got some VERY welcome positive news. Dr. Swisher believes the rib was free of any cancer. The lung nodule is the real deal and we will still have to do more chemo because of that. But they examined the rib and looked at a frozen section of it and found no evidence of tumor. So if that holds up in pathology, which it should, we are back only dealing with a single tumor and rib section was simply an old fracture, maybe from a previous surgery that re-fractured and showed up on the PET scan. We’ll keep everyone posted. Thanks for all the prayers and support. For those wanting to get into the fight along with us, ill be posting information on how you can get involved with the Sarcoma Foundation of America in the coming weeks and my Livestrong Challenge donation pages will go live in December.

  Sammy

  • 2:02 pm
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