Miraculous

After a miraculous stay at the hospital, Sid was discharged on Thursday - exactly one week from his surgery. I use "miraculous" very intentionally. There isn't a logical reason for Sid to be healing so well. We were told his stay would most likely be 10-14 days. 

I should make mention that the obvious blessings apparent in this journey do not (and have not) always help us avoid difficulties. The first night home was incredibly hard. The instant shift from having a professional nurse monitoring all of Sid's meds, food, wound care, etc to us taking on all of that responsibility, was... overwhelming. Every department sends you home with a literal packet of info to read and there are some discrepancies on how to handle certain care. I consider myself a very capable person and I also have a decent background in medical care between my days as an EMT and my college job at the plasma center. It was still a lot to have thrust on us all at once. But with some good planning and tag teaming, we felt much better by the next day. We were also grateful that our kids were being loved and taken care of by grandmas and grandpas so that all of our attention could be on learning the ropes of being home. 

Sid came home with a chest tube (draining fluids from the surgery site) and feeding tube in his intestines. As you can imagine, being tethered to something 24/7 can get annoying; getting it tangled, tripping hazard, attention grabber to the public... Poor guy. But he's handling it all with a great attitude. If he passes his swallow study this week, he'll get the chest tube removed! He will have the j-tube a minimum of 4 weeks, but as each week passes he'll continue progressing in the complexity of food he's able to swallow safely and the tube will continue to become more obsolete. 

Progress is progress; big or small we are grateful for the wins!

As Sid was originally diagnosed as a stage 4 cancer patient he can never - in the technical sense - be considered "cancer free". HOWEVER, the surgery was a major success. The pathology reports gave us incredible news and the surgeons say they got the whole tumor. Sid will start immunotherapy in a few weeks and he'll be monitored regularly to catch any possible recurrences. 

So no, he's not technically "cancer free", but he's literally as close to that as he possibly could be. The doctors have so much hope for him. ❤️❤️

"Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not." - Jeremiah 33:3

Sometimes the answer from God is "yes" and He provides miraculous results - like shrinking 2 tumors and healing from a major surgery in an unbelievable amount of time (he's definitely not done healing, but he's made huge progress); sometimes it's "no" and we still have to make it through a long night of figuring out how to safely administer meds, or many other things that have gone differently than we expected or wanted. My point is that we have always been answered, we just maybe haven't liked it every time. 

But we can definitely say that we have seen great and mighty things. Because even when we have gotten a "no" God has still been there in that "no", and He is both great and mighty. 

He is with us in both ways; ways that we know and ways that we know not. 

Just before surgery.

Day 5 after surgery. About half the amount of tubes he had at his peak. He had gone for a walk to get some sun on the back patio at the huntsman.

I've never seen someone so happy to eat ice! Like a kid at Christmas when they handed him a bowl of ice chips.

Getting discharged. We unintentionally matched and showed our Aggie pride.