We arrived at the hospital between 6 and 6:30 Monday morning. The wait was not long before they took Chris in to begin the prep for surgery. But the wait would be very long until I could see Chris and the surgery was over.
My mother and father-in-law came up in the afternoon to visit and wait with me. My brother-in-law flew in that day and my in-laws picked him up about 5:00pm. My good friend 'S' came up in the morning and stayed with me as well. We actually made the most of our situation and played games and really had a fun time.
It was about one in the afternoon before I heard any updates. The update was that things were going well, but it would be long. About 5:30pm Dr. K came out. He told me then that there was a lot of disease. They had pretty much removed anything Chris didn't need. The tumors were growing into the intestines, so they had to remove part of the small intestine and all but 8 or 12 inches of the large intestines. Our original surgeon performed the part of the surgery to remove the primary tumor from his stomach. The doctor who had done the biopsy on the liver was also in on the surgery for awhile, as well as one more doctor.
The next update we got was about 10:30pm. Dr. K came out to let us know they had just begun the chemo profusion or 'wash'. That would take two hours and then they had to sew him up and put him back together. Around 1:30 am a nurse called out to say they would be a couple more hours. I think is was about 4:30am when Dr. K came out. It ended up being about twenty hours of surgery.
Chris stayed in the ICU for a couple days, then they moved him up to a regular room. He would spend the next 2 1/2 weeks there.
This one, wow, hit me hard this morning, I hear the hope as I remember so vividly at the time, Chris was given a less than 10% chance at survival, yet you believed he would be healed...
ReplyDeleteI just looked up the web definitions for healed, and I liked this one: heal - To make better; to revive, recover, or cure; To become better. Chris knew his Savior was Jesus, therefore in the end he was healed, he was made better, he was revived, he recovered, and he was cured.
Thank you Shannon. When I am done with the 'facts' of what happened in those nine months I will talk about healing and being made whole. I spent a lot of time thinking about that and what it means from an eternal perspective. Thank you for getting that perspective started.
ReplyDelete~Kj