Surgeon Released

Just got home from the long morning of venturing to West Chester (a bit closer than Philly) to meet with the surgeon for my follow-up/postoperative appointment. The TL;DR version is I’m great! 🤣 but from his perspective everything looks good and it’s up to my oncologist to determine next steps.

I’m feeling pretty good, considering it’s been only two weeks since they cut out part of my lung 😳 sometimes I forget it was a major procedure. the pain is down to a dull ache except for when I push it a little too much. I still struggling to get a solid nights sleep but I’m sleeping well enough to function and not sleep all day. I technically have no limitations from the surgeon.

So now it’s just letting my body continue to heal and recover. The shortness of breath will probably be a few months. There’s a little fluid still that needs to clear out, but that’s normal. The general aches and soreness will just improve with time.

For those wanting more detail let me try and explain what I understand as of today.

The area of my king they removed was definitely cancerous, I believe the tumor was 2.9 cm in some direction. It was removed with clear margins, meaning they should have taken out the entire area of concern.

The also took out 14 lymph nodes for testing and they call came back clear! This is good!

Now this has all been forwarded to my oncologist and I have a CT and appointment with her the end of August. They are testing the tumor further to see if it matches my current or different mutation. That might determine a change in treatment.

Now the surgeon was offering some information on things they have learned over the last few years and apparently there’s a chance this small area was simply an area that didn’t want to respond to my drugs… this happen with cancer. There’s apparently a new look into what we did, getting the biggest bang with the overall drug treatment than looking at removing the leftover by surgery.

Although still some questions to be clarified with the oncologist but as of right now we are all feeling positive we made the right choice in doing this exploration and I hope we’ve increased the odds of me being around to annoy everyone quite a bit longer!

A huge thanks to those who have texted, checked in with Jared, sent goodies and smiles! Outside of something weird popping up between now and August, I’ll probably end up letting the cobwebs clutter the corners of this blog some.

🤍Hugs and Love