February 4, 2005 - Surgery Day (by Greg)

The surgery went great and Alicia is home tonight sleeping on the sofa!
This is probably much longer than you want to read, but I know that some people want all of the details...
The day started at 4:30am this morning when the alarm went off. Alicia woke up after the best nights sleep she has had in over a week. She had asked several of you to pray for a good nights rest and the Lord provided. She said that she woke up to the Josh Groban song "You Lift Me Up," and that was a comforting thing, so she laid there and listened to the whole song.
Around 6:30am, Jeff Loaney, our pastor of care and counseling called. He was at the hospital wondering where we were. Apparently, the word didn't make it back to him that our arrival time was pushed back to 7:30am from 6:00am. We felt terrible that Jeff got up early to meet us down there and we weren't there yet. Please forgive us Jeff!
We arrived at the hospital about 7:30am and got all checked in. They hand out local area pagers now (like the ones you get at nice restaurants when you are waiting for a table). What a wonderful idea. We got paged and Alicia headed back to "pod 6" to get changed into the hospital gown. After Alicia headed back, they let me keep the pager. After she was all changed and in her gurney-chair under the heated blankets, they let me back to "pod 6" to keep her company while we waited for her to be taken for the radioactive tracer injection. During this waiting period, Dr. Dietz stopped by and gave us the layout of the day: radioactive tracer injection, nuclear medicine for photos of the radioactive tracer, surgery and recovery.
Around 9:30am, they led Alicia to the breast center in the hospital for the radioactive tracer injection. This consisted of inserting 4 needles into the tumor and then adding the radioactive tracer directly into the tumor. After the tracer was injected, the needles were left in and she was sent downstairs to nuclear medicine. After arriving at nuclear medicine, she was placed on a table and a large camera was placed inches over her. She stayed there for about a half-hour while they took those pictures. (These aren't normal pictures, they are using special equipment that picks up the radioactive tracer. It's officially called a lymphoscintigraph.) The tracer hadn't fully traveled to the lymph nodes yet, so she waited until 12:30pm, when they took the pictures again. This was a little painful in that the needles were still there and she just couldn't get comfortable. She finished the second set of pictures around 1:30pm and was taken right on up to pre-op. The purpose of the radioactive test is to help the surgeon know where the lymph nodes are during surgery.
There was about a 5-10 minute window of time during pre-op that Alicia had the chance to visit with her parents, who had just arrived in town after a 5 hour drive from northwest Indiana. I know that was special for her to get to see her parents before surgery.
During the surgery, several people arrived: Charity (Sister), Anthony (Nephew), Connie (Mom), George (Dad), Linda (Friend) and Nancy (Friend). We all waited until around 4:15pm, when Dr. Dietz came out and debriefed us on the surgery. She started out by telling us that the surgery went very well. The first thing she did was inject her with the blue dye that will adhere to the radioactive tracer making the lymph nodes easier to find. She then extracted 3 lymph nodes. She said that one of the lymph nodes didn't quite feel right, so she had a frozen section performed and that test came out negative. This is wonderful news and is a good sign that the lymph nodes may be completely negative, but we won't really know that for sure for about another week. She then took out the lump and feels that it went well, but she can't really tell whether the margins are good until she gets the results of a test in about a week. Finally, she said that Alicia was taken to the recovery room and that we could go back and visit with her in about an hour.
Around 5:30pm, we all headed back to visit with Alicia in the final recovery room. Alicia was still feeling pretty groggy, but the nurses felt she should go home tonight. We all helped her eat a couple of crackers so that she could take her first pain killer. She just continued to sleep. Around 7:15pm, we helped her get dressed and she was taken downstairs in a wheelchair, picked up in the car at valet parking and we headed home.
She came into the house and went straight for the sofa (it is downstairs, while the bed it upstairs). She is sleeping on the sofa now and by the looks of things, she'll probably be out of it until at least tomorrow afternoon.
Thank you all for your love and prayers. They really do energize her and keep her going. She loves to visit the website and see all of the words of encouragement in the guestbook. Thank you all so much.
--Greg