1/24 Just Over Three Weeks Away

Interesting day today for Josie. She was all full of energy and crabbiness. I think her steroid high is wearing off and that’s why she’s being quite surly. She definitely had the cranky pants on today for Mom. But sprinkled between the cantankerous episodes were some fun-loving good times too. She even found the time and demeanor to sit still and have her face painted. It was pretty cute when she was looking at herself in the mirror admiring her beauty.

The results are in from the Doppler ultrasound of the liver. Part of me thought the report was going to show some heavy snow squalls moving in from the left anatomical lobe, but then I remembered this wasn’t Doppler radar…just something similar. The results show enlarged spleen and liver with normal blood flow, as far as I can tell from the cryptic description. There doesn’t appear to be any blockage either. The texture of the liver is coarse and that’s not the preferred state. We’ll see what the GI guys say tomorrow. They had no insight today when we saw them since the report was not available until tonight.

Surgery was in and we’re on for Josie’s Whipple. It’s set for Friday, February 16th in the morning. That’s just over three weeks away. That will certainly be an interesting day and weekend. Talking with surgery about her condition and her sustained distention…it may be necessary to remove Josie’s spleen during surgery. The reason is that with Josie’s tiny size and the location of the pancreas and gall bladder and other business on which they need to surgerize there is limited space. There simply may not be enough room in there to work. It’s kind of like working on your car and needing to take off the radiator to get to the important broken part. The problem is the with Josie’s enlarged spleen it may need to be removed in order to gain better access, and the bad news about that is once it’s out it can’t easily go back in. So looks like Josie may very well be a few organs shy of a person when all’s said and done. Scary thoughts, but still very doable.