Congratulations, It's a Cantaloupe

I had the abdominal biopsy today. It took about an hour and again, it was much more than I thought it would be.

I don't know why I ever expect things to be easy, because they really never are, but I guess that the optimist in me.

The surgery itself wasn't too difficult. The doctor had seen my CAT scan and thought that the mass in my abdomen looked unusual. He thought that when he got inside things would make more sense, but you already know what's coming don't you? It was just as crazy in there as it was in the pictures!

The funny thing is that the tumors in my abdomen had sort of clumped together. They had blood vessels and lymphatic fluid and had sort of formed a mass the size of a cantaloupe. My motto is slowing becoming go big or go home.

The doctor was actually able to remove an entire enlarged lymph node. The bulk of the surgery was laparoscopic, so I just had a bunch of tiny incisions, but because the doctor was able to get that one lymph node removed, they had to make an additional, larger incision to get it out.

I had a hard time coming out of the anesthesia. No surprise there. I was actually curled up in the fetal position when I awoke.

The nurse kept telling me to stop doing that or I would be cramping up. But of course, I was already cramping up, hence the reason for the fetal position.

The worst of the surgery was that they had to blow me up like the goodyear blimp. My abdomen is still so full of air, it's a wonder I don't float away.

And wouldn't you know, it's the one side effect they didn't tell me about, so I was completely unprepared for how cruddy I feel.

And now, as I lay here, I am comforting myself with the fact that try as I might, with all the diet and exercise I've done, I could never get my belly to be flat. Well, no wonder - I've got a cantaloupe in there!

We should get some preliminary results from the biospy on Tuesday - at least if it's cancer or not. But, the full results will still be a few weeks out.

As it stands, I will start chemo this Thursday and go from there.