Month: June 2016

Today Val was able to successfully start chemo again after her stay in the hospital a week ago.  The new drain that was added from her surgery last week was also able to be pulled this morning. 

With all that behind us she was able to restart chemo today to get back on her every other week schedule for the next couple of months. 

Could you be in prayer for the following:

1) That Val does well responding to this latest treatment. 

2) That we don’t experience any new set backs. 

3) That she has a good week next week, feeling good, etc. 

Thank you for your waking with us!

Marc

Boy has it been a long week!  Thank you so much again for your prayers and words of encouragement as we battled this week. 

Late yesterday Val had surgery to remove the infected expander. That surgery went well and last night she recovered nicely. 

This morning we were uncertain if she would be discharged as there are four different docs who all needed to agree she was ready to go. Early this afternoon we were given word that all was good for discharge and she would be going home on an oral antibiotic. 

Then it took about another two hours to get all the paperwork together. Once that was all done we had an anticlimactic walk together off the floor and to the car. 

Val has a follow up appointment with her plastic surgeon on Wednesday and then hopefully she can restart chemo next Friday. 

We are grateful that she is home!

Marc

Val’s culture came back from the fluid around the expander showing infection. For the medical folks specifically “gram negative rods”.  This particular infection is a little bugger and very difficult to get cleaned off the expander. 

With that news, we made the decision with her docs to pull the expander. It will be permanently removed and we will restart the reconstruction process after the chemo treatments are all completed. 

Val and I are doing good with the decision and have peace having some specific next steps. We are definitely learning to look at the path forward but only take one step at a time, leaning hard on our Lord. 

The kids are doing good with having Mom gone but we are all ready for her to be home.  It may be possible we get discharged tomorrow!

We had the kids up last night for several hours, getting some finals studying done along with some bill paying. It was good being together just doing normal stuff. 

So we are on now night #5 of hanging out at Spectrum. Val continues to be an “interesting case”.  Back in 2003 when we had our last medical experience with Val and it dragged on, one of her doctors said she was an interesting case and that you don’t want a doc to use that description of you. 

Well she continues to be am interesting case with this cancer. Her fever is down and has stayed down since Sunday. On Sunday afternoon we noticed the skin around one of her expanders was warm and red. This pursisted and got worse. 

They did an ultrasound and found some fluid on the expander. It took yesterday to get the medical team all up to speed and a consensus of what to do next. 

So this morning they went in and put a new drain at that site and got some jiffy looking fluid. That fluid now is being tested to see if it grows anything. At this point we are expecting it to grow something. 

Tonight her main doc gave us the challenging news that she is not going to be going home anytime soon. They need to come up with a treatment plan and this also will delay the next chemo treatment that was supposed to be this Friday. 

To put it mildly, we are both discouraged. We are not sure what or how to pray. Thank you for praying for us when we don’t know how. 

Marc

Val had her first chemo treatment a week ago last Friday and had a pretty good week until this Friday. 

Late on Friday afternoon she spiked a quick fever that got fairly high. In addition, the lab work she had done earlier that morning showed her white blood cell count was way low. 

As a precaution, she was hospitalized on Friday evening. They have taken various cultures and are working to see if she grows anything interesting. The cultures take up to 48 hours to grow, so we have been hanging out at Spectrum this weekend.  

Her fever has been up and down so I am glad they are not taking any chances. She has kept her sense of humor though because as we were getting checked in last night she says to me “we had been talking about having a weekend away”…… Not my idea of a romantic weekend 😄