A very long, very good day

Usually in a good story, the author doesn't give the ending until, well, the end. (Except in Pulp Fiction, or Reservoir Dogs, but that reference is probably just for a few, like Randy! I actually thought about naming each of the people we met with today Mr. White, Mr. Pink etc....) Well tonight, I'm giving the ending first. Today was a very good day! It was long, but there was nothing terribly painful or miserable about it, and the outcomes were better even than we had hoped.

We started at 10:30 a.m., and finished at 6:00 p.m. We actually spent 5 hours sitting in one exam room! We joked that for us lately, that might qualify as a date. (I then observed that the exam room door had a lock, but Dee Dee didn't think that was terribly funny.) Every 60-90 minutes someone else would come in and ask a bunch of questions, marvel that this young, fit woman had any serious health issues, and assure us that everything was going to be fine. We met with three docs before the end of the day. Dr. Garst was great; she just sat up on the exam table while we sat in the chairs, and talked. She was friendly, warm, and encouraging. She also said pretty quickly that she was the least important "doctor-piece" to the puzzle, because her specialty is lung cancer. She saw herself more as the facilitator/coordinator.

Dr. Garst then went and personally found a doc we had no appointment with whatsoever, but this was the doc that Garst felt would be the best one at Duke to help decide about the stomach, after the node has been dealt with. This was Dr. Johanna Bendell, a medical oncologist specializing in digestive cancer. She just stopped by to meet us, and couldn't really get into the medicine yet, but was also very engaging. Then (well, 60 minutes later) Dr. D'Amico's personal physician's assistant came in. He stayed for at least 45 minutes, and was fantastic. He connected with both of us, and you just felt a trust with him right away. Further in the conversation, he talked about his faith, and asked about ours! Every doc eventually picks up on the fact that we are in a medical profession; every Christian picks up on the fact that we are believers.

Here's where it starts to get medically great. Dr. D'Amico has invented a surgical technique that he is extremely confidant will allow him to get the entire node out with a much less invasive procedure. He will use a video-microscope and two small incisions (1-2 inches each) to get to the tumor. They will deflate her left lung for the surgery, re-inflating afterward. They will leave a drainage tube in her chest until it stops draining any fluid, about a day or so. She will be in the hospital for 1-3 days instead of 4-5 days with thoracotomy (the one we actually thought was the best option) or 2 weeks with the most serious approach. She will be on prescription pain meds for about a week, as opposed to a month the other way. He has done about 2500 of these surgeries, and feels almost certain this will work. Praise God! Finally, he is going to do this surgery at Duke on Monday, 10/30, which is much sooner than we had thought Duke's wheels would spin.

We still have some hurdles to clear. This whole thing is too big to finish all at once. That's the old metaphor, you can't eat an elephant at once, you have to eat a bite at a time. Today was a really good day for progress, for encouragement, and for basic good news. We still have to find out what the node actually is. We have to decide what to do about the stomach. Also, that was a second lesion lower in the chest, and we have to investigate that at some point. Today, they were not terribly worried about this smaller spot. We'll get to all those things, but for tonight we will sleep a bit better, and enjoy the good from today.

Thanks for praying today. "The prayers of a righteous man availeth much." We are grateful that the are hundreds of righteous men and women praying much, availing much, on our behalf. We are aware of people in Peru and Sweden, South Africa, Slovakia, and Germany, and all over the good ol' USA praying for us. Our prayer is that God would richly bless you as you walk this path with us. Thank you! Thank God!

Tony