Michael had another great day. He spent it slurping jello and juice, sleeping, and then sleeping some more. Eating didn’t give him any unexpected issues but he will still need to take it slow while his system figured out what just happened to it. 

A couple of new data points from the doctor. Today we learned they removed about 15% of his stomach. As a frame of reference, gastric sleeve surgery typically removes about 80% of the stomach, so the fraction they removed from Michael is negligible. The eating challenge is more about the digestive enzymes throughout the GI tract relearning their job than a smaller stomach size being an issue. Since they also removed his gallbladder (standard in this procedure) and the tumor pushed a bunch of organs around to make room for itself, essentially everything in his body that’s related to food management needs to figure out how to work together going forward. So far, they seem to be learning their new jobs well. 

We also learned today that the doctors won’t know if he will need radiation or follow-up chemo until the entire pathology report comes back sometime next week. The good news is that when we asked the doctor, he said it depends on that report and not, “oh gosh yes, you need it as soon as possible.” He then mentioned some positive signs he saw during surgery that also reduce the possibility, but we’ll have to wait for the final report to know for sure. 

And, finally, one of the hospital’s dieticians stopped in to talk about Michael’s future nutritional needs. I won’t bore you with all the details of that but he can eat mostly normally by the time he’s released but will need to avoid hard to digest food for a couple months. So, no cabbage rolls and roasted broccoli for a while, I guess. He should be able to eat nearly anything he wants in the next few weeks (with an eye on what’s best for his diabetes). 

Speaking of boring, I know I’m coughing up a lot of details in these posts and I don’t expect people to give all these long-winded essays their undivided attention. But different people want to know different things so I’m trying to cover all the bases and trying to reduce the number of duplicate questions Michael will be asked down the road. There’s nothing wrong with questions, of course! It means people care! Info dumps like this just seem like the best way to answer as much as possible at one time. 

Tomorrow will probably be the slowest news day yet. Ancillary staff is gone for the weekend so there won’t be any departments other than nursing checking in, and the lead docs are out tomorrow so one of their colleagues will be stopping by in their absence. 

Thanks again for everyone’s support. ❤️