Good news is relative ⁵

I was talking with a buddy of mine last week & he mentioned how much he hated reading all the cancer blogs being written by the peeps around us… “it’s like, who wants to read a bunch of bad news”?

I get that.

But today I’m stoked because good news is relative. And even though he probably won’t read this blog anyway, this post is full of good news (in my opinion). This past week we were escorted to Vancouver (via private plane), hung out with some good friends, had a stellar time with our family, and have had swell after swell of kindness rush to us from our community in the form of meal offerings, booze runs, photo sessions, and chore volunteerers (yup, it’s a word now).

But I’ll shut up now & let Ingrid fill in all the details.

Big relief

– by Ingrid

This last week has been a week of waiting for results and that has been hard of course. I had a meeting with the liver surgeon last week and he told me that he needs to take 60% of my liver away. That basically would be the whole left side but crazy enough, most of it grows back so that is a good thing. The surgery is a big one with lots of risks and a big incision that will go right across my belly (right under my ribs). So my scars will look kind of like an arrow. <Sweet!> I told him to at least make it nice and tight. I always wanted a “tummy lift”. They don’t have to break my ribs to do it but they lift the whole rib cage to get to it. Crazy!!

So this surgery will be after doing 3 months of chemo to help shrink the tumours and to stop the spread of cancer through the blood stream. They cannot test the blood to see if there is cancer in it but chemo is supposed to do the trick. I will have a 4 week break before I will have the surgery!

On Friday we went to Vancouver with some very dear friends to have a PET scan done. The scan doesn’t hurt or anything, they only inject you with stuff that makes you radioactive and they scanned my upper body for about 20 min. So the whole thing was about 2.5 hours and the rest of the time we spent enjoying Vancouver and spending time with our friends. What a blessing.

We had such a great time enjoying every minute!

Of course I have been super scared to know if there is any other cancer in other spots but today I heard the news that they can only see the spots on my liver and no other spots. Anything that is smaller than 1 cm they can’t detect on any of the scans.

So I feel relieved.

The oncologist also thinks that I might only need 3 months of chemo (before they thought that I needed 9 months of chemo in total). They think that it might not be good for my liver to do more chemo after surgery. Sooooo praise God, that is soo much better!!!

There is still 50% – 70% chance of the cancer returning but he said that they will keep monitoring it really closely. So for now that is what I am looking at, and I think that I can do this. I can fight this thing.

I will get blood drawn on Sunday (Oct. 28), I will have a PICC line put in my arm on Monday, I have to pick up meds this week and I will start chemo on Tuesday (Oct. 30)!!!  Sooo keep praying for me please!

Thank you so much for all of your support – I really appriciate it so much.

We have also started a Facebook group for those of you wanting to stay in touch on a more frequent basis – join it here.