OOps. Oct. 1 can't be the ultimate moment of truth because...

I just realized (after a whole 'nother day of reading) that the Oct. 1 pathology report can only tell us what the scraped out tumors tell the pathologist.

That is NOT the whole story.

Oct. 1 can tell us the "grade" of the tumor--its aggressiveness/invasiveness rating. But what Oct. 1 canNOT tell us is the ultimate "clinical stage" number, which can only be determined after the surgeon goes in through the abdomen (rather than through the, ahem, so-and-so, as he did for this past week's inspection) and looks at the lymph glands. Without a lymph gland inspection, I am pretty sure they can only speculate about staging.

If any one lymph gland is participating in the misbehavior, then the stage can go as high as 4. And to know for sure that we are safely in a lower stage, they have to rule out the lymph glands.

This is good and bad. Bad because we have yet another kind of wait. But good because we have another break in which to calm down and get ready for the next revelation, while hoping the next revelation is one of purely good news.

AND we have great reason to expect that the lymph glands are clear--in that the first pathology report from Watauga Hospital in Boone, after the CT scan, said there was NO lymph involvement showing up on the CT scan. Meaning it's NOT at stage 4. And stage 4 is exactly where you DON'T want it to be.

So yeah. That's today's update.

I hope I'm not wearing out your interest with too-frequent updates. It's hard to know how to do one of these blog things. I have to guess what's too much, and what's too little.

I wish we could just have a big party and you could all just come over and play with us.

And make m'lord William laugh.