11 hours and counting

We made it to Utah nice and easy on Tuesday evening, our kids did very well, no screaming! Dan's Wednesday pre op appointment was very long, just because they were busy with lots of patients, but the extra info was very informative.  We were surprised to hear that they were going to take more lab work and if the tumor marker went up again, then they would cancel the surgery and do chemotherapy.  We thought we were past that, but apparently not.  The doctor was great and said he was going to take his time so we are to expect a long surgery about 5-6 hours.  He also said not to plan on being able to have more children after this, which we knew of this possibility a month ago.  However, we have read that you can ask for a nerve sparing surgery where they try not to damage certain nerves and we have heard of stories of the body recovering after a year or two and functioning as normal.  We are not too concerned about whether or not we are capable of having more kids, we adore the ones we have.  But it was also a little surprising to hear our doctor lay it out and say to us, don't plan on it.  He said he does do the nerve sparing surgeries, but he is NOT going to do that on Dan because of the size and locations of the cancer.  It is delicate enough to perform, and his biggest tumor is just bigger than what they normally remove with this surgery, so he said nerve sparing is just not happening.  He said a lot of doctors reviewed Dan's case, it was a little tricky, since it wasn't completely by the books, but they all feel confident about this procedure right now. (As long as the tumor markers didn't raise again) Tumor markers rising indicate another type of cancer is in the lymph nodes that would respond to chemotherapy.  If it is just the Teretoma, the markers should not be rising since it is a mature cancer that does not spread quickly.  They officially staged him as a Stage 2C

Today we called the hospital after 2pm as instructed to find out what time Dan's surgery would be.  They said to be at the hospital at 6am and surgery would start at 7:30am tomorrow.  That means we get to leave my parents' house at 5am and wake up at 4am! We are glad though that it is first thing in the morning.  Dan has been on an all liquid diet today to prepare for the surgery. Not fun for him.  After finding out what time the surgery was, I called the nurses phone number to find out what the cancer marker results were from yesterday.  The nurse let us know that it had gone done to 12!  It was 17 two weeks ago, so we are thinking that has got to be a positive sign!  Hopefully they will keep going down after this next surgery and he won't have to do anything else!

Dan will be in the hospital 4-5 days and I'll be visiting him every day, but the kids are sad that he will be gone for so long.  It's a good thing we have so many fun distractions for them here at Grandma and Grandpa's house.  I will try to keep you all updated on how he is doing!

Rachelle