Update 12/2/08

It just occurred to me as I looked at all the hits on our site that maybe I should blog and let everyone know how Gracie is doing post surgery. Well, she is doing very well. The surgeon was concerned that she might have some internal bleeding, but we passed the critical 12-hour period with no signs of bleeding and now we are up to 24 hours so it's looking really good. Gracie is really stable and NOW we have the OPPOSITE problem - her blood pressures are TOO LOW! Isn't that great news! Actually, it is. We were expecting that and things are fine. They put her on some dopamine to bring them up but I think by tonight they will probably take her off of that completely and then I just have this feeling that her blood pressures will be JUST PERFECT! If you can imagine this, the tumor was taking up about 2/3 of her abdomen. It was roughly 5 X 7 cm! So now she has this HUGE space there. Anyways, one worry was how the good kidney would respond post surgery, if it would be injured at all, but she has been producing urine all day and things are looking good there. She is in a lot of pain I can tell. Her scar runs across her whole abdomen so I imagine it is very painful. That is probably her biggest issue right now but they have her on 2 drips of narcotics, so hopefully that keeps most of the pain at bay. I am still waiting on the "official" surgery report to come through. I get copies of everything and read all the reports. The informal word I am hearing is that they got good margins, but I don't know for sure if that is true or not. If they did get great surgical margins, I guess there is the chance she might not have to undergo more chemotherapy, but I haven't really heard the official word on that either. Soon I will start working on getting the doctors on board with my plan.....the "I want my Gracie home plan." Soon, very soon. I will post pictures soon too, but I can't find my camera cord so I have to hunt that down.