The kids started school today.
Carolyn is a senior and I'm going to miss her something fierce next year. She's on the tennis team, in Productions (theater company), in the school play, has 13 piano students, 3 USU concurrent enrollment classes, takes piano lessons and voice lessons and still has a 4.0. She rarely sleeps and she eats a lot of ice cream!!
Jacob is in 8th grade. He continues to be a ray of sunshine. He is always happy, still gives me hugs and loves loves to swim. If he could swim for 8 hours every day he would be so happy! He plays the piano and just advanced to Life in scouting. He's a pretty amazing kid!! We're finishing up his last two merit badges and starting to plan his Eagle project. Notice I said "We"... holy crapola, it is so much work to raise a human!!
Another new beginning for Dan... he gets to start chemotherapy. We had our appointment with Dr Gray today. He is amazing!! So very kind. I felt bad not being home for the kids today. I have a tradition of buying a new apron every year and having warm cookies and milk when the kids get home. But not this year. Instead they came home to an empty house while Dan and I took detailed notes his chances of surviving this whole cancer thing.
As it turns out, Dan has the very worst kinds of colon cancer possible.
Dr. Gray gave us some good news. The surgery was very very good. He said Dr. Pickron was exceptional. Dr Pickron was able to get 22 lymph nodes. Of the 22 nodes only one is infected. Dr. Gray says we have a strong case for skipping the radiation treatment that usually comes after the 6 months of chemo. He explained that radiation is only done post surgery for rectal cancer patients, never for any other kind of colon cancer. This is because rectal cancer is a much worse cancer that is harder to treat. But also because it's hard to get the lymph nodes during surgery. So, in other words, sometimes the cancer is in the lymph nodes but you don't know it because the surgeon only excized 5 or 6 or 7 nodes... but Dr Pickron was able to get 22 nodes! The pathology has clean margins, meaning the cancer was not in the surrounding tissue. These are definitely miracles. So, with only 1 lymph node out of 22 infected and clean margins, it is extremely unlikely the cancer is still in the colon area. So therefore, radiation is likely unnecessary. This is a tender mercy as the radiation will likely cause some irreversible damage.
The portacath that will be used for chemotherapy infusions will be placed on Thursday afternoon.. a small surgery. Chemo will start next Wednesday. It will be 48 hrs of intravenous chemo every other week for 6 months.
Six months.... :(
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