Surgery Details

My pre-op appointment went as well as we could have hoped for today. Let me start by saying that MD Anderson is beyond AMAZING! Each and every person that we encountered there was uplifting, friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable (even the cafeteria workers!). They valet park their new new patients and then validate. They had greeters at the door to welcome you and to see if they could assist you in getting to all of your appointments. They post signs to let you know how long you will be waiting to see your respective doctors. They have volunteers with piping hot coffee, tea, and hot chocolate and lots of uplifting stories of survival to share. We started in the Melanoma clinic and filled out all of our paperwork, saw three PA's, the insurance coordinator, the doctor, patient appointment scheduler, clinical trial scheduler, and nurse. We couldn't believe how many people were there to assist in our "case". The doctor was really reassuring that the cancer showed no signs of metastasising anywhere other than my upper layers of skin and tissue. He explained the entire surgery in detail making sure we understood exactly what each step would be. He explained that they will be removing all the tissue below the incision down to my muscle fibers as well as separating my skin away from my muscles in order to close the wound. This leaves kind of an open "pocket" in my chest. In the first few days I need to remain propped up in order to avoid fluid build up in that pocket. After that, I will need to do no heavy lifting, driving, running, jumping, sudden movements, etc for 4-6 weeks to give the skin time to "stick" back onto the muscles. I will be numb for at least a few hours after the procedure, after that I may or may not be on narcotics after the surgery, it just depends on how I feel. So after that appointment was done (it took nearly three hours to see all of the staff individually) we grabbed a quick bite to eat in the restaurant downstairs and then rushed over to have some pre-op blood work done. Then we headed upstairs for a cardio work up. Had an EKG and met with the doctor to make sure the heat stroke wouldn't affect anything related to the surgery. He gave me his stamp of approval to be under anesthesia and gave me a thumbs up on overall heart health saying that I didn't need to follow up with a cardiologist anymore relating to the heat stroke. Yahoo! One more kind of doctor to check off of my list! By the way I impressed all my doctors with my amazingly low heart rate (55 bpm). They all asked if I was an athlete...I told Jacob that was reason enough to let me run more races in the future! Hah! Then back up to the melanoma clinic to schedule my pre-op appointment with the anaesthesiologist for tomorrow. The surgery will for sure be on Wednesday but we don't know what time yet. So basically I look perfectly healthy except for the melanoma. I have so much to be thankful for! You can't help but be grateful when you walk around MD Anderson and see all of those who are in the midst of their battles with various forms of cancer. Its humbling to be a member of their family. Thank you all for your prayers. I definitely felt them today!