Let me start out with saying that anytime I spend the day with this smiley chubby little boy my day is brightened. This is Dillon, my sister's 9 month old little guy who is just so pleasant and makes me grin.
My sister, Bev, spent the day with me and chauffeured me to my doctor appointment. It was great to have her emotional support, pampering, and her witty way of making me laugh.
I must also say that my surgeon, Dr DeVos, is such a caring, gentle, soft spoken man with a great sense of humor who has won my utmost respect with how he has provided my care and handled these sensitive issues.
So, the Doc first removed my staples and applied butterfly strips to my incision. This was not painful and caused me no emotional stress. On the other hand...getting the drain pulled out was one of those moments that I will always be able to think back upon and shudder when remembering the feeling of this very long tube( I honestly had no idea it was that long)being pulled through my abdomen and out through the skin; more icky and weird then painful. My abdomen is now stirred up and more sore, but I do now have some "good" pain meds. to help me deal with the discomfort.
On a more serious note, the surgeon gently revealed that I cannot consider myself cancer-free. He removed 60 lymph nodes from my colon (apparently I have an overabundance of lymph nodes because he said most people have 15 or so in that particular area of the colon, but I had 60. This is not good nor bad, just the # that I had). Out of 60, only 2 of the lymph nodes were infected with cancer. The cancer had also spread into the left ovary which they removed. It had NOT spread into my bladder or abdominal wall, but the mass had just attached itself to those areas. Since I am young (yeah, 39 is still young, just in case there are any teenagers reading this) and they want the best long term prognosis for me, the Docs words were "they are going to throw the book at you". My next step is to see an oncologist and will probably start chemo in about a month. He said chemo would last approx. 6 months., but I will get a better idea of what this will look like once I meet with the oncologist. He did encourage me with the fact that he feels I have come through this surgery amazingly well, and that means something going forward. Of course, I'm thinking that I'm glad I did not come through this poorly because "amazingly well" was NO fun.
So....How do I feel about all of this???
That's where the mixed emotions come in. On one hand, I realize that the report could have been much worse and I'm praising my Saviour that is wasn't.......but, on the other end of things, Chemotherapy never paints a pretty thought in one's mind and was a path that I was hoping and praying I would not have to walk through. Take heart in knowing that I am not down and out about this. I really believe that God has a purpose and a plan for allowing this trial into my life and at the end of all this, I will have a clearer vision of what that plan is and I will be able to fulfill that purpose with a renewed zeal and eternal perspective that I would have otherwise missed out on. He loves us so much, it's AWESOME!
PS...I still really need your prayers; not only for me, but for Shawn and the children as well...we are in this together! And thank you to everyone who is helping us in one respect or another. It may seem like a small task that you are doing, but to us it is HUGE...everyone has been such a blessing!
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