Tuesday Sept 5th

Today we went in to meet with my surgeon, Dr. Chiavetta. He is very nice and I feel very comfortable choosing him as my surgeon. He gave us the results of the MRI and said that there were 2 other "small" areas of concern. One behind the large mass and one below the mass that are both about a millimeter in diameter. (not much compared to the 4cm by 3cm of the large mass) As far as they could tell my lymph nodes look okay. They a little on the big side but still in the "normal" range and not enlarged. Dr. Chiavetta said that since this is an aggressive cancer that he definitely agreed to start Chemo Therapy first before we do surgery. I am going in to have an PETscan in the morning, then doing a "Chemo Education" class at 10:45 and then going into surgery around 1pm to have the port placed in my chest. BUSY DAY!! I am sick of beeing busy. Chemo Education sounds so funny to me, but I suppose it is a good way to introduce patients to the process and be able to get a lot of questions answered. With the port they will put me out (yeah). The doc said it would take about 20 min to do the procedure but to get ready and recover we are looking at the whole afternoon. If you want to see more of what the device is click here. Very interesting I thought but will apparently make my life easier, and I am all for anything doing that at this point. We also had a gal (Emmy Anderson) come to the house tonight from the American Cancer Society. Jon and I have recently gotten to know her brother Matt and his wife Amanda. Matt had cancer a few years ago and inspired her to start working for the ACS. She gave me all sorts of great information to read and told me about some really neat programs that are available to cancer patients. It is amazing to me all of the wonderful people that have crossed my path along this journey so far. She is such a sweetie and I know that I will be calling her with all sorts of my questions along the way.