Our Trip to Houston - Jan 2024
The flight to and from Houston was easy this time.
Scan and blood work on Wednesday and then follow-up appointments on Thursday (Jan 4 was the one-year anniversary of his first surgery — the colon resection). We met with his liver surgeon early Thursday morning when the final radiology report hadn’t been produced yet, which meant that the surgeon was looking at the liver intently. He was confident that he would be able to resect it this time around even though the liver tumors have gown slightly. However, once the final radiology report came back, it showed that the nodules in Zach’s lungs have grown despite the 3 rounds of chemo. This means the cancer isn’t stable, and doing surgery when cancer isn’t stable isn’t a good idea. When we spoke with the medical oncologist she went through some potential options, but we are going to make another appointment with her to finalize the new approach.
We are dancing a fine line of doing chemo that is aggressive enough to get the tumors smaller, but also not so aggressive that it damages the liver to the point where surgery is no longer an option.
Even though the news we got wasn’t great, we met people who were beginning their journey at MD Anderson. She was diagnosed with Stage II pancreatic cancer. Her CT scan was at a similiar time to Zach’s scan, and her appointemnt was at the same time the next day on the same floor as Zach’s. Zach and I talk about why this is happening to us, but we don’t ever talk about it in a desperate “WHY ME - WHY US?”
As I sat with this woman’s husband as she and Zach were back being scanned, I knew how he felt, because I have felt the same, praying the scan comes back good, trying not to think, becuase thinking can lead to some really sad thoughts of the future. We sat there together and he asked me questions about what the appointments the following day would be like, and I anwered them the best I could. I asked him about his wife, and he told me how they met and how they have been together for 52 years and their love of travel.
As I reflect back on the last year, we want you to know that cancer doesn’t define Zach, and being the caregiver doesn’t define me. We are more than that, and we want our conversations with people to be more than rehashing the last update.
We still have dreams, and desires. We desire to help people and pray they will know the same peace and love we have in Jesus. We still dream of growing old together and taking cruises with other old people and hearing Silas give us a hard time that we should be saving our money instead of spending it on travel.
We also hope and pray for a miracle — that God would heal Zach from this cancer.