Update on John

Welcome to my first post regarding John's "ailment" and the treatments that he's getting. I sent out an email, explaining everything we found out at a consultation with a surgeon yesterday. The email explains most of John's symptoms and what we think is going to happen in the next few weeks.

Synopsis: John has "something" on his pancreas that caused him to lose an alarming amount of weight very quickly and made him jaundiced.

Hello friends,

Some of you know some of what's going on in my life recently and some don't. I want to thank you all for your personal notes of care and concern to John & me in the last few days and also let everyone else know about our situation.

Here is the update now that we got Thursday's Dr's appt out of the way. The surgeon showed us the CT scan and explained how the placement of this "thing" is making John so sick (he's lost about 40 lbs in the last month and he's bright yellow and he itches real bad, all over). The good thing about it making him sick now is that it means that we were able to know it was there AND CATCH IT EARLY!! It blocks bile ducts and stuff because it's located at the head of his pancreas. The reason most pancreatic cancer prognosis is so dire is because there is never any sign that anything is wrong.

So we have good news/bad news kind of situation. The bad news is that he more than likely does have cancer in his pancreas. They don't actually know that because they won't do a biopsy till they take the whole tumor, along with alot of other guts, out of him, but they are treating it like it IS cancer and they are going to be very agressive about it. We really liked the Dr and we believe he WILL be aggressive and not leave anything in there that could threaten John's life. From the CT scan, it doesn't look like it's gone to his liver or metastisized at this point but they will only know that for sure once they go in and see. He is also getting a sonogram today, which will give them another view of things in there.

They are going over scheduling the Dr and Operating Rooms right now and he said the surgery will be scheduled for 2-3 weeks from now. The surgery is major! He will be in the hospital for 10-14 days after and we don't know how long recovery will be when he gets home. There will be lots of tubes and bags and Borg shit that will be ugly and uncomfortable and John is not crazy about it.....but he's less crazy about the other alternative.

He's going to a gastroenterologist on Monday and there is hope that they can put a stint down there that will relieve the blockage of his bile ducts. This would be so great if they could do this so John can eat, get rid of the jaundice (that drives him crazy with the itching), put some weight on before the surgery and give him his energy back. If they try to get out of doing that tomorrow, I'm going to raise hell. (not a pretty picture as I'm sure you can imagine).

All in all, we are relieved. It's so good to be out of the dark and to know that there is a plan in place and that the chances for John living a long life to torment his kids and his wife are really good. I will be much happier now that we know something. The last 2 weeks have been scary and frustrating and so hard to watch my husband deteriorate so badly.

I'm going to postpone surgery to have my gall bladder out. I seem to be managing the attacks with my diet, but in the past, I have gone many weeks without an attack even on a high fat, campaign diet, so my preference would be to get it outta there ASAP.

So....that's all probably more than anyone wants to know about someone else's guts, but there you have everything I know about our life situation. If you have any questions, I am more than happy to answer them the best that I can.

Smile!!! It's all good news and very good chances for a great outcome. That's the best part. John is happy. Taryn is off to Mexico and Elliot will hear all about this later today. We're in pretty good shape. Once I get the house clean, life will be damn near perfect.

Peace, hope and love to you all. Thanks so much for being part of my life. I know this is not the most personal way to get this information out, but I care about you all and know you care about me, so please feel free to call if you want to ask any questions or talk about anything else.

So this is what we know so far.

Here is an explaination of what this Whipple Surgery is all about

Since I can't figure out how to get a picture in this confounded thing, here is a pretty good visualization that shows what it all looks like and what they cut out.