Winds of Change

You never know how things are going to turn out.  One minute everything seems perfect and then the wind can change and you are in a battle.  We made it through a diagnosis of cancer, through surgery and through treatment.  We were going for the second or third CAT scan on Kim’s thyroid to check for any new growth.  We had done it before and things had always come out fine.  This time though there was a fluke.  See the technician running the CAT scan machine ran down a little bit too far and got the upper part of Kim’s lungs in the scan.  When the radiologist read the scans they saw some spots on her lungs.  Now for anyone who has been through cancer and is in remission, spots on anything in any kind of scan is serious business and reason for panic. 

The doctors decided to give her a full body scan early.  She wasn’t due for one until one year out from her surgery but because of the spots they felt it was best to go ahead and take a look at everything and see what was going on.  The scan revealed some good news and bad news.  The good news was, there didn’t appear to be in abnormal activity going on in the lungs.  The bad news was they found a suspicious spot in the upper thigh of Kim’s left leg.  Again we began to worry.  This time around our care team handed her off to a whole new set of doctors who quickly scheduled her for a biopsy.  It came back in conclusive.  After a long discussion it was decided that the best course of action was to remove it, after all now she had a history of cancer, so you couldn’t be too careful and you needed to treat anything as suspicious.

Now every surgery has its risks and this one was not without.  One of the things that they told her was this tumor was wrapped around the muscle in her leg and there could be damage as they tried to untangle and remove it.  It was a risk we had to take to make sure a potential time bomb was removed.  The surgery had some complications and they had to remove some of the muscle.  In doing so they also damaged some of the nerves.  They had removed what they thought to be a danger, but in doing so had caused a whole new set of problems that she would have to live with the rest of her life.  It left her without feeling from her knee up to her hip in her left leg.  Also with the removal of some muscle it weakened her leg to where she has some limited mobility.  It is one of the prices to pay to make sure she makes it to another day.

Our day paddling started out beautiful.  We were moving along at record speeds for us.  Two hours into the day we had made 8 miles.  Before noon we had covered over half of the 21.7 miles in today’s leg.  Spirits were high and we paddled on without even stopping for a second break.  But then the winds of change came a blowing.  With some headwinds gusting at times to what was forecast as 25 knots, we paddle on.  Against the wind we continued.  We actually amazed ourselves by arriving in camp by 2pm.  We had completed the mileage in 5 hours.  The only thing we could say was, amazing!  We have been riding on a cloud with the excitement.  I am convinced there is nothing this team cannot do.  We have proclaimed ourselves paddling gods and goddesses.  But we must not let it get to our heads.  We must be vigilant because things can change around any corner.  But today we revel in the accomplishment we made.