Our day at Saint Joseph’s went very smoothly and Karen is home and doing well from the surgery. We arrived at 06:00 a.m. yesterday morning and were on our way home by about 12:15 p.m. What took the largest part of that time was the MRI testing prior to the surgery. Basically you want to measure twice and cut once or in the case of surgery measure dozen’s of times and cut once.

As I mentioned in a previous update the imagining they do prior to the surgery is much more intense than that done for regular diagnostic testing. It’s not uncommon for there to be more tumors or lesions found prior to testing. They did find what could be another problem a short distance away from the known lesion but were unable to determine if was or wasn’t due to Karen’s kidney function which can be severely hampered or even shut down if not watched closely, due to the gadolinium dye that is used to highlight lesions throughout the body in a MRI test.

It was decided that only the area known to be an absolute lesion would be treated today and follow MRI testing would be done to determine if the new area was indeed a lesion or just a large blood vessel. The Gamma Knife surgery itself went well and amazingly took only about 35 minutes.

Our family would like to thank the Neurosurgeon, Dr. Chris Tomaras the Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Henry Cline the physicist we didn’t have the opportunity to meet and the woman who pulls the whole process of machine, people and paperwork together Rebecca Heitkam for the attentive and thoughtful way they took care of Karen. We can’t recommend St. Joseph’s Gamma Knife center or the staff highly enough.

We would like to extend a special thanks to everyone who has been praying for us, to our church family and neighbors for the meals and support, to the people of Delta Air Lines too much to list, and most of all to God for giving man the wisdom to create such machines and the knowledge to use them.

Karen is scheduled to see the cancer doctor 16 August and may have chemotherapy if it is determined she is well enough to endure the treatment. This week please pray for rest, peace, wisdom, discernment, strength, relief from nausea, the destruction of cancerous cells, for the health of good cells, and that through it all that our family will be a light to those in darkness and an encouragement to others.

Until next time…