Heigh ho, J here,

First of all, my apologies for a slow update. I actually thought that I had pointed out my twitter feed, where I have been updating regularly, but as you can see I actually didn’t (until now). Sorry about that.

Fortunately, no news has indeed been good news. Lisa came through her surgery with flying colors. Both surgeons (the one who performed the mastectomy and the reconstructive surgeon) gave excellent reports right after their respective portions. Lisa was into her visitor-accessible room just after 8PM on Thursday. She spent all day Friday at the hospital, making good progress mentally coming around but not feeling up to walking yet. Saturday morning, her mother and I arrived in the AM to find her sitting up with her feet on the floor, pants on, reading catalogs, having finished her bacon & egg sandwich (!). She was done with being in the hospital, and those of you who know Lisa know the look that was on her face. 😀

So she’s been home since Saturday ~11AM and doing just fine, all things considered. The meds keep her mellow, but we’ve tweaked the dosages just a bit (less of the narcotic pain-killer, but more frequent) and she doesn’t get truly woozy. We’ve also added Tylenol to the mix with the surgeon’s blessing, and that seems to be filling in the little “gaps” in the pain management. She gets up and moves around on her own, although she still mostly stays in bed.

The extra bit of good news that we’re trying not to be tooooo excited about just yet is that the biopsy of her lymph node that occurred during surgery was negative, which indicates that there is no further cancer to be concerned with. The reason we’re not hopping up and down yet is that that was a “rough” test that has 85% accuracy; they then send to a lab for the more thorough test, which comes back in 7-10 days. The rough test is still pretty accurate, but since the chance is still out there we’re trying not to get ahead of ourselves.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts, prayers, energy, and positive messages. It was amazing, actually, how my new smartphone (I’ve been completely phone-less in the cell phone era until ~a month ago) let me update people and share their sentiments with Lisa while we were in the hospital. Anyway, I’ll post again in a day or so as things develop, and don’t be surprised if you hear from Lisa before too long; she already couldn’t help herself from sitting briefly at her desk and checking mail. 🙂