Home from the hospital6/5/2005
I'm back from hospital and recovering, slowly but surely, from the
lymph-node removal surgery. I still feel pretty rough, but getting
slightly less so each passing day.
I have an incision going from just below my ribcage to about three
inches below my navel (although it makes a detour around the navel
itself) - about eight inches long in total, with 43 staples holding it
together (these will be removed Monday). I'm forbidden to lift anything
more than five pounds, which means that I'm only able to type this by
asking someone else to place the laptop on my lap for me. My appetite
is about a half of what it usually is, and even this is a substantial
improvement in the past few days.
All of this combines for a fairly miserable experience, but on Friday I
got the news that made the whole thing worthwhile - the pathology tests
of the removed nodes had all come back clean, which means that as far
as it's possible to measure, I'm cured. The irony is that this doesn't
mean I was cured by this particular surgery - it means that I'd already
been cured and this surgery was in fact completely unnecessary, except
that without this surgery it was completely impossible to know that.
This means that I won't need chemo, and it means that there's a 95%
likelihood that the cancer won't return again in my lifetime. Woohoo!
It's a little hard to feel appropriately overjoyed while I still feel
so crappy, but I can say with some confidence that if they hadn't come back clean, I'd certainly feel an awful lot worse, so I guess I can say I'm pleased :)
Anyway, that's about it for now. Thanks again to everyone for their thoughts and prayers.
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