Michele Update --- Good News!

I am so glad that so many of you are enjoying these updates. Thank you for the positive feedback and your prayers for Michele. Your prayers are paying off! Here is what Michele writes today:

"Good news again ... I had my surgery on Tuesday to remove all the lymphnodes from my left groin and results came back clean which means no further cancer was seen in any other lymphnodes. It looks like the cancer only made it to one lymphnode and we hopefully got it all now!!!! I will get more info on treatment later in the week.

I was taken back by a few of the side effects of this surgery and am finding that my recovery is going to be slower than I had anticipated. The doctor told me 2-3 weeks "downtime" but I had a different interpretation of "downtime" I guess :) I thought I'd be bopping around by this weekend and I find myself hardly wobbling. I fully expect to be in better shape on Monday once he takes my drainage tube out, but my staples will remain for another 10 days or so. In addition, I had a nerve running right through the tissue that was removed so that nerve was severed and has left my left thigh from my groin down to the bottom of my knee completely numb. I am having trouble getting used to the sensation of feeling like I have a "dead leg" from my hip to below my left knee. It's causing me difficulty walking and bending. In addition, the nerve damage sends shooting pains down my thigh to my knee when I bend in any direction too much. Hopefully at least some of this feeling will come back, but there's no guarantee so I may just need to continue to adjust to this and be thankful this is all it is and appreciate how much worse this could be. In the meantime, you may notice me wobbling a lot slower than usual. I borrowed a DVD from my neighbor across the cul-de-sac yesterday and told her I wanted to walk over to get it, but not to expect me for about 20 minutes ... she thought I was kidding, but I wasn't :)

Even though I am still in healing-mode, I am enjoying the fact that for a few more days my family-of-six (still seems surreal) is together and we are really enjoying the time we have together. The kids absolutely adore Ryan and we are all having so much fun together! Ryan is adjusting surprisingly well to the change in volume from the nursery at the hospital to our house and is quite a content little guy! We have found many fun things to all do together at home and I am just going to savour these moments over the next few days until things get turned upside down again once Andy leaves on Wednesday. I can guarantee a glass of wine and many tears are on the menu for Wed night, but like everything else we've been through up to now we WILL get through this and will be so much stronger in the end because of this. Let's just focus our prayers on Andy's safe and speedy return now ... just when you thought the prayer requests were over ;) -Michele"