Update on Renee DeAngelis: Kate Spencer said to us the other day, “Celebrate every iota of progress” and yes, hey, we live richly and if there was ever a time in life where richness is so obviously not defined by money it is now. Renee has made great progress. She is now 9 weeks post-op. Last weekend she spoke of how she’d read that after 3 months she shouldn’t feel the surgery much anymore, despairing that there was no way that in another month she’d be free from all the crushing weight she felt of her neck locked up and screaming each evening after a day’s exertion of rehab work and just living. So how surprised was I when she spoke just a couple days ago of feeling freed, feeling that she might be able to go, say, climb a little in another week or two. Would that this was the whole story. It turns out that Renee needs another surgery. No, not in her spinal cord, thankfully, not really anything so massive. Not anything so serious (or so we believe, think, expect, hope). The pre-op MRIs from two plus months ago showed some pelvic cysts. Yeah, normal, women get em, no big deal, but if they are large enough, they should be monitored. We managed to (mostly) put this out of mind as they remained out of sight and hoped they would benevolently exit just as they entered, or rather shrink where they’d grown. A follow up last Monday showed the opposite, so in the knives go again. I won’t bore all with the medical lexicon we’ve explored here but the really crap part is not knowing; we can’t totally rule out another (totally independent) cancer despite good indications on several fronts: cysts are common, ovarian cancer is not. They mostly look quite clear, benign and fluid filled, but as our radiologist friend Shannon says, ultrasounds are like looking through a mud smeared window. A CA125 blood test, looking for a cancer marking protein, came back negative, but the test is not definitive either positively or negatively. It’s not cancer, we know it in that new-agey believe it and manifest it and make it so sort of way. We won’t know with certainty until they are out, biopsied, and pathology tells us (good!) news. And when will that be? We still don’t know. Unlike with Ernie who, once ratted out by the MRI, was evicted in very short order with the urgency of a disaster waiting to erupt, here it’s prudent to take the time to test and test and find the right procedure, right doctor, and the anxiety sucks. Intellectually I totally get that we should recognize our good fortune for having access to the health care to figure it out with tests and consultations. We get that but *feel* the anxiety. The ideal: a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure, a successful outcome with only two weeks and its accompanying zillion office and lab visits between here and there. Renee says, "Fall down seven times, get up eight". I steal from our bro Aron: "Spot the landing and stick it". So all you who have been so wonderful as to share well wishes, visits, etc etc. all the way through these months, thank you for helping Renee remember her positive, enduring and fired up self. Keep on (but… if you call, text, email, etc., don’t be put off if we don’t respond. It’s a bit raw yet.)
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 18:39:39 +0000