On your marks...

Good News! We are getting discharged from MD Anderson tonight! Lauri has shown great improvement today, and they have been able to control her pain with oral medications, so they are letting us go home within a few hours from now.

Early this morning Lauri's chest tubes were removed, taking with it the source of the extreme pain she had encountered yesterday. Shortly thereafter Lauri's epidural was capped and she was given combinations of Hydrocodone and Oxycodone to control the pain as the epidural wore off. The Surgery Team decided to go ahead and give Lauri two units of blood to get her hemoglobin count up, which will make her feel better. It takes time to get blood orders on the regular floor rooms here, and it takes about 2.5 hours to infuse 2 units. We are waiting for the blood transfusion to finish up before we are allowed to leave.

Even better news came this morning... Assuming Lauri's CT scan in January is clear of cancer (which it should be), further chemotherapy treatments will not be required! We were visited by our Oncologist who told us that based on the Surgeon's reports stating that all of the nodules were successfully removed and no further nodules were found, chemotherapy should not be required. We meet with our Oncologist and take a CT Scan at the end of January. As long as the CT Scan is clear, which we expect it to be, then we will finally return to our normal monitoring checkups every 3 months.

We'll post again when we get home. Pretty excited now, the worst appears to be over!