Summer Fun and Surgery

Soon after James was done with chemo we were ready to move on and have some fun! And by soon I mean two days after his treatment was finished, we met with his doctor, had his port removed, I picked him up from the hospital and we hit the road! We were so ready to move forward with our lives. So we headed to Idaho for the summer to beat the Arizona heat. It was pretty nice feeling like snowbirds this year.
Before we left though, James had to have more imaging and lab work done. His tumor markers were normal still so that was perfect. There was one lymph node that was still enlarged though. It was measuring at 1.3 cm and they wanted it to be less that 1. We had done the imaging a little early though so the doctor just told us to have more imaging done in a month and we would go from there.
Our summer was perfect. We went mountain biking, boating, running, to weddings, saw family, everything we wanted to do! We were care free and having fun and the lingering lymph node was the least of our worries.
One month went by and we went in for more imaging. His lymph node was the same. We were slightly disappointed but by this point we just kind of expected things like this to happen so we just went with it. Our oncologist in Arizona had found us a doctor to work with in Idaho so we met with him and decided what our next step needed to be.
Originally, we were told that if it didn't shrink we needed to have it removed immediately. Now we were being told to monitor it again and go from there. Of course we didn't really want to do more surgery so we took that advise. Well, after about a month we didn't feel right about our decision so James spoke with his AZ oncologist who recommended that we meet with a surgeon about the lymph node. Sure enough, he was surprised we hadn't had the surgery and suggested that we remove it immediately.
James and I talked about going back to Arizona to have it done but we found out the surgeon there wasn't covered by our insurance and James would have to stay in the hospital for at least 5 days post surgery, so it just made sense to stay where family could help. We did our best to squeeze in some more summer fun with a quick trip to Bear Lake and a camping trip in McCall and then it was time for surgery.
James ended up having a RPLND, a retro peritoneal lymph node dissection, basically they cut him open from sternum to bellybutton and then remove all of the lymph nodes in the area of the enlarged one. This was the most major surgery we had dealt with by far but everything went well and we were just glad to have it over with.
After the surgery they did a biopsy on everything they removed and found that all of his cancer cells were dead and the enlarged lymph node was a teratoma, so by removing it, they were basically able to consider him "cured". They can't really tell you that you're cured until you have gone 5 years cancer free, but this was the best news! Even with the surgery, it was a great note to end the summer on.

     

And we spent our 6th anniversary in the hospital, it was still awesome.

She just wanted to jump on Daddy the whole time.

Sorry, it's a little graphic