Day tripping takes on a new meaning...

Day trip Monday to Virginia Mason was productive to say the very least. Huge heartfelt thank you to Lesa for spending almost 12 hours driving me, encouraging me, asking better questions than me, and helping me navigate the campus in Seattle ~ even hopping around on one high heeled shoe when the other one broke!

My very pregnant surgeon; Amy Anstead, MD, Otolaryngology, Director of Rhinology,  decided on a second flexible laryngoscopy. A lovely tasting numbing agent burned going down the back of my throat, but she had apple juice to rescue me! My friend also got to see her "take a bite" out of my tumor up on the screen. This second biopsy will help her to determine which form of adenocarcinoma I actually have and to "stage" it. We are praying it is a strain that responds well to radiation and/or chemo therapy. There are some that do not and are recurrent. As an added attraction, she also showed us my PET scan. This is an interesting portrait and not at all flattering. It did however confirm that although my nasal area glowed like Rudolph's, there was NO cancer anywhere else, and this is VERY comforting.

My same day surgery will be on October 30th which is just weeks before the surgeon's Dec 1st due date. She will perform a Right Medial Maxillectomy with removal of the adenocarcinoma mass, the right turbinate (aka my right side humidifier), and a partial removal of both the septum and the eggshell thick bone around my right eye. And all of this will be done through my nose! I have a pretty small nose so we'll see how that goes. My surgeon says she has never had anyone complain about the side affects of missing the above mentioned parts of my anatomy once the cancer is out! 

Our next stop was a second CT scan. Easy peasy three minutes start to finish. We now had plenty of time for lunch and a tour of the city since Dr Anstead also asked me to hang around for an MRI at 3:30. We met a few interesting people on our trek, ate at The Corner Cafe, and Lesa quickly got her shoe repaired two doors down, for only $6!

Time for the MRI. I get very anxious and claustrophobic with these and the "helmet" and tight quarters make me nauseous; but it was for a much greater good so I prayed the fear right out of my head. The MRI staff put lavender in my changing room and  put another sticky lavender scent thing on my shirt to help me relax for the long procedure. It did help. To distract me and disguise the nerve shattering banging of the magnetic imaging machine, they put their special metal free MRI headphones on me which played scratchy country music extremely loud. Believe it or not, it helped too.

We got on the road at 5pm... yep, that's right, I-5 @ 5... and the traffic was actually pretty reasonable.

More to come...