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Monday, March 25, 2013

ANNIE'S CANCER POST SURGERY

After all the sweating, worrying, waiting and praying we received a call January 13th from the surgeon letting us know they'd obtained clean margins. Annie's office appointment 3 days later brought more good news - no radiation needed. Her stitches were removed but from now on Annie needed to see the Oncologist every 3 months for a checkup starting from the date of her 2nd surgery.

The surgery site was healing nicely. I checked her incision every few days gratified to see and feel the hard ridge of the incision receding nicely. It seemed a bit odd but both ends of the incision were still hard and lumpy. I surmised the reason to be extra dissolving stitches at the ends but didn't know for sure since I'm not a doctor or surgeon.

Meanwhile, Annie seemed to continue to be a bit uncomfortable when lying down on the surgery site although it happened less and less as time passed. My January 30th examination of her incision turned up a stitch protruding from the end of the surgery. We made a special trip to emergency to have it removed and were told if any more came up we could cut them ourselves.

So Annie continued on the path to a full recovery. For the first time Artie and I felt she had a good shot at a full recovery and we had an opportunity to have Annie in our lives for a few more years at least. Dare I hope I could consider my sweet Annie a cancer survivor? I toyed with the idea of doing a monthly count of her progress but decided to put that idea on hold until after Buddy's one-year anniversary. Little did we know Annie would face more medical issues.

And my list of takeaways from this experience? The lessons learned will be outlined in my next post.

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