Surgery is Coming!

We met with Dr. Karwande yesterday.  It was quite the ordeal getting Trent down there.  This is his lowest point in his chemo cycle and he was pretty dead to the world the whole time.  Dr. Karwande is supposed to be off work this whole week but he met with us because Trent is a cancer patient and he gives those priority.  He looked at the scans and decided he would do the surgery.  The tumors are all near vessels but apparently that is not as big of a deal as I thought  They must not be sitting on vessels.  Dr. Karwande said the major deciding factor in doing the surgery was the fact that no new lesions had popped up throughout Trent's treatment.  He said the best surgery for Trent is to slice the breastbone and remove tumors from both lungs at the same time.  He did bring up the possibility of watching the two small nodules in the left lung but ultimately decided he would probably just take them out.  He could only see 5 tumors on the scan-that's down from the 9-12 that we started with.  There is a chance that there will be more or less when he gets in there so he will just have to feel around and take anything that is suspicious.  He will not remove any lobes of Trent's lungs, partly because he feels like he can get the tumors with taking too much tissue, and partly because in the event that Trent ever needs this surgery in the future, there needs to be as much lung as possible to remove at that time if needed.  We are working out a few details with the insurance and as soon as we have that taken care of we will schedule surgery.  We are still thinking that will be in the middle of February.  So, Trent will have a couple of weeks from now to get stronger.  He is hanging on by the skin of his teeth right now.  A couple of weeks will make a big difference for him.  We are anticipating about a one week hospital stay and then 2-4 weeks of recovery.  That is way better than we thought it would be.  We were really expecting more time in the hospital and about two months to recover.

We are still cautiously optimistic about everything.  It almost seems too good to be true, like, if I get my hopes up it will jinx us and something bad will happen.   Dr. Karwande said that Trent was between a rock and a hard place.  Well, duh!  All we have faced are "hard places".  But, we have had awesome support and Heavenly Father has watched over and protected us the whole way.  He didn't make it easy, but He has given us the strength to do it.  We just need a little more...