A new normal

I didn't post yesterday. It was good to be home and to enjoy a somewhat normal day, and I needed to wait till Taryn was home before I could post. Brother Pat is in town and it's so great to just spend time with him and enjoy his company. It's also nice to have that sort of relief from taking care of everything with someone else who understands what needs to be done, the sort of "protection" from everything that John and I both need.

Friday at the hospital was a little pins and needles for everything. They wanted to make sure that John could eat after making him fast for 2.5 days. It was good that there didn't seem to be any problems and everything went down smooth, without creating any more inflamation.

Before anyone arrived at the hospital, Dr Lah, the gastroenterologist who did the stent procedure, visited John to (somewhat cavalierly in my mind) let him know that the biopsy on the cells they got came back positive. I'm trying not to be pissed off at the Dr for the manner in which this was done. It seems to me that when you have news like this, it might be good to wait till the patient has some sort of support system at hand to help them deal with the news. Altho there is still alot of hope that we've caught the cancer early and that it will all come out in the Whipple surgery, it just seems like it's major enough news that you might treat it with a little more gravity than a bullet point in a list of things to know.

As with everything, you have to deal with things as they are and not how you wish they would be. There's no way to change the way Dr Lah dealt with this, so I'm doing my best to move on and not worry about it so much. There are alot bigger things that need to be dealt with right now, but when I get the chance, I will be noting to anyone that asks, that I think this was a crappy way to do this.

After I found out this news, and cried and talked and got myself a little more on balance, I once again took the long walk to CK Chang's office to find out if John was still going to be on schedule for having the Whipple. Luckily enough, he was in the clinic and I was ushered right in to his office to sit down and talk with him. I was a little surprised that he didn't know John was in the hospital and that he'd had the set back with the stent procedure. I had been assured by his office, on Wednesday, that they were going to inform him. Bureaucracy can be SUCH a bitch sometimes I guess.

Nevertheless, Chang was nice, reassuring, comforting and he answered all the questions that he could for me. He needed to see what the pancreas looked like to determine if we could still move ahead with the surgery and that made some sense to me. He promised that he would visit John when he was done with all his clinic appointments and that would before he was released from the hospital. Eventually, after seeing John, he did make the decision that the surgery would happen on schedule. We are glad for this, but this holding pattern we're in right now seems loooong.

I wanted to take a moment to say a special thank you to a few very good friends who were nice enough to come and take me away from the hospital for a little while. Martha, Penny & Joy, thank you so much for coming and changing my perspective on things for a little while. Thanks for the great dinner. It certainly beat the crap out of the cafeteria food (a whole nother story that I won't even bother with here), and more importantly, it was so nice to be surrounded with friends and love and care. Thank you for taking the time out of your lives to actually be there. Thank you for letting me cry on your shoulders and thank you for giving me the time to try to express some of the things that are going on inside. It made a world of difference to me and as long as I live, I will never forget it. Thank you also to Marie for getting in touch and doing your best to come over and help. I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you but there was alot of running around and people calling and details are not something I'm real good with at the moment. It's something I need to work on.

So Taryn is back from Mexico now. She and Elliot have been filled in on the latest and they seem to be taking it fairly well. We're a funny family. There's alot of love here, but we all seem to take our fears & tears to a private place alot of the time. Whether that is to maintain the illusion of strength or to keep a positive facade on everything, I don't know. Maybe it's just that nobody wants to lose hope and to cry or show fear might make people think that we have.

Still, I'm glad that Taryn is home. Her joyful presence in the house already makes a difference.

I'm going to try to attend a brunch today. John is not sleeping well at all. I think the itching is still getting to him and he doesn't feel like he knows how to sleep right anymore. We feel like we are just waiting waiting waiting. One great thing is that John has enjoyed a couple of beers since he's been home. They don't serve them in the hospital and the Dr gave him permission to have one a day. Beer is proof that god wants us to be happy and indeed, John is happy to be able to have one.

More catching up later.

THANK YOU for popping in and for caring about us. We love you!
Vicki