No Surgery!!! At least for now... (originally posted 4/3/2009)

Hi everyone.

Let me start by apologizing for how panicky I was on Monday night. Like everyone else, I have a really bad day whenever we have to put Mom in the hospital. With her hving cancer, we never know exactly what all is going on, and I tend to get a bit panicky until we know more of what's going on.

Wednesday, they ran the small bowel follow-through, the test where they were determining how long it took the barium (radioactive dye that shows up on XRays) to go from her stomach to her colon. The surgeon told us that if it was over 8 hours, we would need surgery. Wednesday night he told us that the films from hour 7 showed the dye almost to the colon, and the films from hour 8 showed the dye well into the colon. Since it was very borderline, they ran more tests yesterday (Thursday) to see where the rest of the barium was. If it was completely into the colon/rectum area, we should be OK, but if there was still any in the small intestine, we needed to seriously consider surgery.

So, after wating at the hospital until 10:30 for the surgeon to show up last night (he never did), I went back this morning. He was in the room when I got there, and was telling Mom that this looks like a low-grade obstruction, and we are able to avoid surgery! He did caution us that this is not the end of the story. This will happen again. At some point, we will end up having another surgery, possibly ending up with a colostomy bag. Obviously, we want to avoid this as long as we can. However, it's totally in God's hands.

We think Mom should be able to start back on her Chemo meds soon, but the oncologist and surgeon are consulting to decide if maybe these drugs partially caused the obstruction. That would be very odd, considering how the drugs work, but it is possible. So, we'll keep an eye on that.

The oncologist said that we will probably get to go home Sunday, we are seeing how she does with solid foods again. No point in dismissing her if she will just end up in the hospital again with the same problem in two days.

Thank you all for your prayers. We keep asking for more prayers, because we really feel like we need them right now. Dad and I have been praying a lot lately. God has really started giving us peace about everything. Obviously, we don't know how long the battle will be, but we are treasuring all the time we have. The doctors are very positive though, and said we don't need to look at the idea of losing her for qute a while.

Dad said something this week that I have quoted a lot since he said it, because it truly matched what I've been feeling. God promises that He won't give us more than we can handle, which proves one thing - He knows me a whole lot better than I do! This is so hard to go through, but we really appreciate the prayers, and I know they are working. Even if Mom isn't healed, at least we are beginning to really accept this, and will eventally get to where we ar OK with it. God's plan is better than our plan, even though He and I have been arguing that point for a couple of months now, at least in the case of Mom. :-)

As always, please forward this to anyone in the family that I forgot, and I'm sorry if I leave anyone out!