February 14, 2005 (by Greg)

We attended the post-op consultation visit with Dr. Dietz this afternoon. The news is really good, but not perfect. The good news is that Alicia is "node-negative". This means that there was no cancer found in the lymph nodes. Praise the Lord! The other news is that the margins around the tumor are good, but they detected some early stage cancer cells near the margins still remains. This means that Alicia will need another surgery, but a much less invasive one this time. The lymph nodes are the real painful part of the surgery, but since they won't be doing anything with lymph nodes this time, the pain will be much reduced. They will essentially just increase the margins by taking more tissue surrounding where the original tumor was located. The tentative date for this second surgery is the first week of March.