How's Linda Doing?

Hi Friends! This is a post from Laci, Linda's daughter.........

Over the past few weeks Linda hasn’t been feeling the best. She unfortunately has had to increase the amount of pain medicine she takes daily to comfort herself from the pain she has been experiencing. Many times throughout the day her pain level is between a 3 and 8 on a 1-10 scale. Last week she found out she has a “fistula”. This is a tear of the colon. Currently some of the waste from her body is exiting out of this tear and then exiting out of her vagina. This is causing her even more discomfort than normal. Surgery is scheduled for Thursday, February 3rd. There is an 80% chance of success during this surgery. Because of past radiation and current chemo this could cause damage to internal areas and make it harder to repair. During the surgery they will implement a colostomy bag which will likely be permanent. This will help to reroute waste out of her body. This is crazily a great thing. Many minutes and hours of the day Linda has to use the bathroom (because of the fistula and tumor) so this will allow her to free up some time during her day. We are hoping for a great outcome of the surgery and hopefully this will help to relieve some of the pain that she is having. A quick note is that she is still in a clinical study and for the Doctor to know if she is on the drug “Avastin” they will need to “un-blind” her from the study. Avastin is a drug that doesn’t really let the body heal. Early this coming week they will know if she is on Avastin which we all believe she is. She has to be off Avastin 4-5 weeks before surgery so that is why the surgery is scheduled on Feb. 3rd. We’ve also decided that it would be best to give the body a break from all of the chemo so for awhile (6+ weeks atleast) she will not be taking any chemo. Hopefully this will allow the body to heal even better after the surgery.

After the surgery, we’ll take it day by day with the MRI’s and CT’s to see if the tumor will stay the same or if it will grow without being on the chemo. Then we’ll all make the decision to get back on the chemo or attempt the BIG surgery. The big surgery would be the surgery to try and remove the tumor. At the same time a complete removal of the colon, vagina and uterus would be necessary to get the tumor. They would also need to remove it from the tailbone they believe it is connected to. This surgery would have about an 80% survival rate and a 50% success rate. It doesn’t sound that bad, but all things considered this would be the last ditch effort to treat the cancer. There could be major complications from the surgery. There’s also a chance that she could have more pain consistently than she does now OR on the bright side it could get much better. We won’t really know until we come to that point…if we do.

So right now Linda’s life if ruled with a lot of pain and a lot of pain meds. She tries to record all of the pain meds that she is taking in a journal but sometimes forgets. Sometimes (only some) she takes a little more than she should which causes her to be loopy and hallucinate. So….because of these “sometimes” we have created a schedule for friends and family to check in with her during the day while Gary is working. They do not have to be there all the time but just check in to make sure she’s not TOO loopy. Then, hopefully, she will not blow up another one of her beanbags (that she uses to heat to treat the pain spots) in the microwave! 

So lots of prayers for Linda are appreciated right now. We are praying for her pain to GO AWAY (or even decrease would be nice), that she will have a successful surgery and that this tumor will shrink and go away. Thanks for everyone’s thoughts and prayers during this time!