Thanks for the update, LAW. Prayers will continue.

My prayers are with him (and you)

another quick update...he is making a REMARKABLE recovery and was moved from ICU to a regular room today. The dr. anticipates about another week in the hospital. He is very clear-eyed and coherant, sitting up in a chair and coughing....pretty good for essentially being gutted 48 hours ago.

Sounds great!

Wow, that is remarkable!

They know the cancer will return? :(

((((LAW & Family)))))

Not that he had cancer, but Mr. Lixy had a large portion of his colon removed in 2001...without the need for a colostomy bag, though I think his current condition might have been aleviated if they had of bagged him for a while, till he healed. <---To that, I can't be sure...just a hunch!

Anyway...Mr. Lixy was under the knife for about 5 or more hours and it was so late at night (emergency case) that I was alone in the waiting room...and I "cleaned" the entire room twice! They told me they were scoping his appendix and he'd come out with, at the most, a six inch incision. Came out cut from sternum to pubes! No meds hooked up to him...came out of the mind blog in extreme pain. Tubes down his throat, up his nose, in his belly...EVERYWHERE! Morphine to the rescue! He was on it for 4 days and I didn't like his reaction to it (though he scolds me now for making them take him off it...lol!).

Oh...my point? He's said that he now knows the worst pain there is on a "scale of 1-10", which they constantly ask you when you have surgery. He can commiserate with a new mom's cesarean birth! But...as soon as he was off morphine and up and about and able to "walk himself back into shape", he was a new man! I hope you FIL has a remission to beat all remissions and I continue to keep him in my thoughts and send vibes of health!

Well good news and bad news lately.

First to answer Steph's question, yes they have called the cancer "extreamly agressive" and are quite positive that it will return. Their main goal in doing the surgery was to 1) get him out of some of the pain his tumors wer causing and 2) to get the cancer cells down to a level that can be more easily managed with chemo and radiation.

So things have been up and down the last couple of days. Monday night, he had some difficulty breathing and his heart rate dropped into the 40's. At one point, his respiration quit entirely, so they puth im back on the venilator. (The inlaws from hell didn't really see the need to call his son about this until almost 4:00 the next day, which really hacks me off, but that's another thread...and hopefully one that won't get hijacked). Anyway, once they got him back amongst the living, they took him down and did another CAT scan, and found LOTS of fluid on his lungs, which my mother in law believes was caused by too much morphine.

Physically he has done much better since then. His respiration is steady, he got several tubes and wires removed today, including his feeding tube, which he is VERY happy about. We argued sucessfully with the nurses to remove his morphine drip, which they did and his pain is staying at a pretty constant 2-3 on a scale of 10 without the morphine. Without the morphine, his lungs have cleared up dramactically.

He has another round of chemo scheduled about six weeks from now, but so far, so good.

Thanks for yourprayers and thoughts, and will keep you posted.

LAW

lonelyarmywife,

Good to learn of his progress. :)