Pieces falling into place

While the pollen is falling into the yard, and coating the driveway in a light greenish hue, Pop sits on the porch admiring the weather. He has been sitting here more and more often the past few days. He has energy to do about an hour, or hour and a half, worth of work, then he needs to rest. Somehow he is starting to see his boundaries, and is trying to keep his strength up for the coming weeks of chemo and radiation. Finally, the necessary appointments have been falling into place for him to begin treatments. Yesterday, Pop had his meeting with the doctor who will be taking care of his radiation. The doctor is great, and Mom and Dad were so happy to be under his care. For the first time since Pop's diagnosis, the doctor pulled out the PET scan and showed the family the tumor. It was strange for Pop and Mom to finally see it. As Pop put it, "Is that it? How can something like that cause so much pain and discomfort?" The doctor spent time helping to explain what was going on, as well as how the radiation would hopefully help things. The meeting was only meant as a consultation, but a cancellation in the afternoon gave an opportunity to start defining where the radiation was going to occur. So, they laid Pop down and started determining where they were going to be shooting the radiation. Now it is interesting how this is done. They will shoot radiation from different angles to try to hit the tumor from as many sides as possible. To know exactly where they are shooting, they made marks on his body with pens, but later with ink (Pop literally got tattooed). Us boys tried telling Pop that he might as well not stop there, but that they could move out to his arms and perhaps tattoo a road bike on his upper arm, or maybe the name Nancy (apparently they don't do those kind of tattoos there we were informed). The missing link, so that he can start treatment, came today. His port (where the chemo is administered in his chest) needed to be surgically placed, as well as his feeding tube (inserted through the stomach into his lower intestine). There was debate among the doctors as to the type of feeding tube that needed to be placed, but after some consulting (and persistent phone calls by Mom) the doctors came to an agreement that it would be better to place a feeding tube that allows for possible resection of the tumor in the future. This means that there will be a few more doctor visits, but next Tuesday Pop will go in to Lancaster General Hospital for a surgery to have both of these items placed at once. This will require that he stays in-patient for a day or two (which he was jumping up and down with excitement about, as you can imagine), but he should be ready to start treatment after he has recovered. That tentative start date is April 19th. We will be praying that Pop can have good health up until the surgeries, that both surgical procedures will go well, and that he is physically ready to start treatments on the 19th. Christ has walked every step of the way this far, and we know that he will continue doing so!