I've got a date

Okay, I've got all the dates for all my upcoming stuff.

First of all, on July 27, I'll be having my IV port removed. If it's anything like having it put in, it'll be a simple procedure. I'm a little nervous about what will happen to the blood clot, but I spoke with the nurse at my doctor's office about it yesterday. She reassured me that it shouldn't be a problem. I will have to continue on the Lovenox until the clot finally goes away, but removing the IV port should help speed up that process.

My surgery is confirmed for August 3. I have to be at the hospital at 12:45. My surgery starts at 2:45 and should last approximately 2.5 hours. Cathy will be here and will have a call list for anyone that would like to be notified when I'm out of surgery. Please send me an email (or call me) and let me know if you want to be on the list.

The good news... I am being admitted overnight after the surgery. My oncologist thought that it would be an outpatient surgery, but my plastic surgeon's office tells me that anytime they do any kind of reconstruction (even just the implant expander), they keep you overnight. So, I feel much better about that. She told me that it would be at least an overnight stay. So, they'll see how I'm doing the next day and determine if I'm ready to go home. I'm just so relieved that they're not sending me home immediately after the surgery. That was really starting to concern me.

I also spoke with the company that handles our disability claims at work today. The way short-term (and long-term) disability works is that the first 5 days I'm out of the office, I have to take out of my paid-time-off. I have about 5 weeks (and have only taken a little over a week so far), so that works out well. Neither the first 5 days nor any other days off have to be all consecutive since it's all related to the same illness. This is really good news for me. That means that beginning sometime in April, the time I had to take off for chemo is all covered by disability... as is all the time I'm going to have to take off for surgery. That's also a huge relief to me.

Well, it looks like phase 2 is well underway. The cool thing about phase 2 is that in a few weeks, it'll be over. Phase 1 lasted for four months, but phase 2 will be done in a couple of weeks. Phase 3 (radiation) probably won't start until sometime in September. That will be a little longer... almost 2 months. But when that's done, the cancer should be gone. Phase 4 is more like an epilogue... the cancer will be gone, but I will still need to have my reconstructive surgery done. That won't happen until a few months after I've completed radiation. So, when all is said and done, I will have spent a year dealing with this. If that's all I ever to deal with related to this, then it's not much in the big picture.