Sorry For Not Updating Sooner

Sorry, sorry, sorry!!! We just enjoyed Mom's progress so much that we forgot to make time to update the blog.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday went pretty well. Mom met with the oncologist. He basically introduced himself and told her that they would meet after she goes home to discuss her treatment options. Yes, they got the tumor out, but they still have people do some chemotherapy to reduce the recurrence. She's been getting up walking a lot. She takes several walks a day. Unfortunately the chest tube is still in. She still has too much drainage to take it out. We'll get to that in a minute. Her lung is doing sell. The area of collapse is gone and it is completely reinflated. Thursday, Jeremy and I came up. This was his first time seeing her since the day before her surgery. I was a little difficult for them both, but they both benefited from the visit a great deal.

We noticed yesterday that the clear light yellow drainage was more like skin milk in color and clarity. We didn't know if this was normal or not. Also, the drainage started to increase. Today, I was here when Dr. Salamat and Dr. Seligson came to see her. According to them, the skim milk drainage is fats. Okay, how's that? Apparently, there is a duct that runs from the intestines where they absorb fats from what you eat. The duct winds up the body and distributes the fats where they're supposed to go. The portion of the duct that was behind her lung in the area that was removed has a small leak. Dr. Seligson said there are two ways to fix the problem. One way is to do another surgery. He doesn't want to do that because she is doing so good otherwise. She just flat out doesn't want another surgery. The other way, is to restrict her diet limiting the fat she takes in and wait for the leak to seal up. She said, "Oh yummy!" Dr. Seligson is on all weekend, so he said if he didn't see any improvement by late tomorrow he will restrict her diet even further and have her get a PICC line put in and have her put on TPN (IV nutrition). Long story short, she's here for probably another week according to Dr. Seligson.

She's making the best of it though. We're grateful that the tube was still in and caught the problem before it came out and she went home and caused a HUGE problem. We've hooked her up with everything from crosswords to movies. We even figured out that her laptop isn't as old as we thought it was. It actually connected to the guest access here so she now has internet to occupy her time. She is remaining in good spirits given the new development. I forgot to give you all her new room number, it is 3055. It's not as good as her other unit, but it's home until they say otherwise.

Thank you all again for the continued prayers. She is definitely one lucky lady!