Another Update!

It's been over two months since my last update.

Andy had surgery on August 28 to remove a handful of cancerous lymph glands in the abdominal area. It is a pretty invasive surgery so he stayed in the hospital for five days. His parents came to visit for his surgery and were a big help in driving back and forth to the hospital. There are only a handful of surgeons who perform this kind of surgery in the area and you want someone with lots of experience so we went to the big hospital a little further away.

The surgery itself lasted for six and a half hours--very meticulous--but went very well. The surgeon was very pleased.

Andy was discharged that Friday and all was going well until the following Tuesday when we noticed a significant amount of drainage from one spot on the incision.This did not seem normal so we immediately called the doctor. He told us to come right in to get it looked at.

I was going to drive Andy in to the doctor myself but Andy insisted I call a retired friend of ours to help. It was a good idea because Andy was moving extremely slow at this point (big incision!). I figured some extra help getting him in and out of the van would be helpful.

When we finally got in to see the doctor, he took one look at it and declared that something was not closing correctly and Andy would need emergency surgery to reopen the incision and then re-close it properly.

This was right around noon by now and surgery was quickly scheduled for 3pm. We were assigned a hospital room and quickly escorted over to the hospital which was right next door. Andy got settled in his room and they began prepping him for surgery. Thankfully, he had eaten very little that morning and had only drank some water. I stayed with Andy in pre-op until they wheeled him away to surgery. I then met up with our friend who had come with us. I was so glad that we had asked him to come as he sat with me in the surgical waiting area during this unexpected surgery.

Again, the surgery went well. The doctor was so busy that he called me on the waiting room phone instead of coming out for a consultation. He said there was a good amount of fluid built up and had it not been caught right away, it could've gotten very infected and caused much worse problems. They put a wound vac on the incision to dry out the area before closing the incision back up.

Andy was in the hospital until Friday again. Before discharge, the surgeon came up to remove the wound vac and then staple the incision closed again. Call me weird but I enjoyed watching the process! It was fascinating.

While the surgeon closed him up, he said "Oh, by the way, the pathology report came back and there was no sign of cancer in the lymph glands. Just dead scar tissue." This was the best news! We were so thrilled and give God all the glory for this!

Andy has been home for over two weeks now and is doing good. Recovery is slow but coming along. He sees the surgeon on Tuesday to get his staples removed.

He had an appointment with his oncologist on Friday. Everything is looking good. He'll have some more CT scans coming up just to make sure everything is clear. The oncologist still wants a specialist to take a good look at the nodule on Andy's lung and possibly remove it. We are waiting to see what will come of that. Our "lymph gland" surgeon says there is over a 99% chance that it is also dead scar tissue as everything seems to work together in this kind of cancer. Even though it is most likely nothing serious, the oncologist wants to be thorough and we appreciate that!

Thank you for your prayers!