Michael continues to improve and is doing great. He feels a whole lot better than yesterday and was able to spend some time sitting up in a chair. Tomorrow they will walk him around and get him moving a bit more, and may even move him to a regular room. The ICU staff says his doctor favors patients staying in ICU as long as possible so if he is not moved tomorrow, that doesn’t indicate a setback or concern.
If Michael were writing this he would say the biggest event in his day was getting ice chips. He was very thirsty after surgery but had to wait until today to be approved for ice and he says that delay was actually worse than any post surgical pain he had. I spent the entire day feeding him tiny ice cubes out of a cup like a baby sparrow. 😊 Other than that and some back pain from lying immobilized in the OR for 10 or so hours, he’s feeling physically okay and not in any kind of distress or intolerable pain. He also continues to be in good spirits and is beginning to come out of the anesthesia brain fog he was dealing with yesterday.
The surgeon stopped in this morning and is very happy with Michael’s progress. Right now there’s a lot of watching and waiting and not a lot of prognosticating about release dates and long-term health management because the medical team is focused right now on just making sure he stays healthy, heals well, and gets stronger. They didn’t end up needing to meddle with his intestines and such, so recovery will be easier (relatively speaking, of course) than first anticipated but it’s still going to be a lot. What all it entails remains to be seen, including whether he will need chemo and/or radiation, but we’ll know more in the next few days.
I’ll share a little more about the surgery now, so if you’re squeamish this is where to stop reading.
Information is still coming in about exactly what all went on during surgery because, frankly, even the surgeons seem a little floored about it all. Multiple surgeons across his team and the ICU have mentioned that Michael is — and I quote — a medical miracle. Despite the tumor’s size, placement, and vein/organ involvement, it did very little damage. As expected, they did take all but a tiny piece of his pancreas. However all the potential GI involvement did not come into play after all so rather than losing parts of his stomach, intestines, and an assortment of veins, they were able to snip the tumor out and leave nearly everything around it intact. In fact, even the blood vessel that’s been the source of so much worry sprang back to life after they routed it out like a bad storm drain.
Michael required over a dozen units of blood, which was a combination of his own cleaned and recycled blood and donor blood. As one of the doctors put it, that was a “transplant-level” amount of blood for a procedure that usually lasts only four hours or so and requires none.
They sent a quick cross-section of the tumor to pathology during the surgery and it came back as a Grade One (very good and no change to the original biopsy report from two years ago), but the doctor said he can’t confirm it’s a G1 until the final report is in. He was able to confirm that it was well-differentiated, which means it had clean lines and didn’t have a lot of cancer-containing tendrils reaching out into the surrounding tissue. That is also very good. And, best of all, they said they didn’t see any evidence of metastasis or organ involvement elsewhere.
I’ve been passing along everyone’s support and well wishes. It’s meant so much to us both. That’s all for now. I’ll check back in tomorrow. ❤️