My Dad's Health

We interrupt this blog inactivity with some news/information of actual importance.

It has been a while, but I think I should post an update on my Dad’s (pictured above in a very cool old picture my wife unearthed recently) health situation. This will just be a brief summary, so if you would like more details, please feel free to email me. If you are new to the blog or to knowing me, you may not know that my Dad was diagnosed with a relatively rare form of cancer a couple years ago. Successful surgery removed a tumor the size of a nerf football (sorry to be graphic, but it still blows me a way to think about) from his abdomen.

Unfortunately, all too soon, the cancer returned. My Dad has been living for several months now and maybe more like a year now that I’m thinking about it with multiple tumors on his Liver and one in his chest. There is a drug that has proven to be effective against this type of cancer that my Dad has been taking and the regular CT scans had been showing that the drug was doing its job and stopping the growth of the tumors and in some cases even shrinking some of them. With the exception of some nausea and some days of exhaustion along with some other relatively minor side effects, things were going quite well.

Then a couple weeks ago, we got some more bad news. One of the tumors on the liver is growing rapidly and not being stopped by the medication. In less than 3 months it has more than doubled in size and is now roughly the size of a tennis ball.

There are lots of reasons that is bad (as I’m sure you could deduce) even though the tumor has yet to cause any symptoms. First, it means doubling the dose of the medication which could ramp up the side effects substantially. Second, something else will have to be done to stop this tumor. Basically the options were/are surgery to remove it, try another drug that has rather awful side-effects, or go in with a scope, stick hot wires in it and burn it to death. Of these, that third option would be, by far, the preferred option.

Today, my Dad talked to the surgeon who seems optimistic he can go in with the scope and kill this thing without full blown surgery. So, while the discovery of this new tumor has been very bad news for the family, we got some good news today so praise God.

He will have the procedure on the 15th. If all goes well, he could be in and out in a day or two. If it doesn’t, the surgeon will surgically remove the tumor. That would be major surgery with something like a 3 month recovery time, so we are very hopeful that could be avoided. So, if you are the praying kind and would be willing, please pray for my Dad and the success of this procedure. And pray for my Mom as well as she supports my Dad through this. And pray for me as well. My Dad and I are close and I could use your prayers.

Also, if you are not the praying kind, you are really, really missing out and should really try to do something about that. Not the point of this blog post, but I’m just saying, email me or something because prayer is one of those rare things that is even better than advertised and it is really unhealthy to go even one more day without it. Just looking it out for you.

Thanks.