Ultrasound Results - Kind of

Thank you to everyone who's reached out to ask about my ultrasound results. I received the results on Sunday, but I couldn't make sense of them, even with ChatGPT. (Why do radiologists use their own secret language that only they can understand??) Since I didn't know what the results meant, I held off telling anyone until I had something to say. I knew I would at least get the full reading when I saw my oncologist on Tuesday.

So we waited; a perfect discipline to cultivate as we start the season of Advent and waiting for our Savior's birth. We made it to Tuesday (whew, waiting wasn't easy), but it turns out we didn't learn a whole lot from the ultrasound. Nothing to verify the cause of everything going on in my abdomen. But we were able to rule out a blockage. Normally, not finding a blockage would be a reason for rejoicing, but in this case, a blockage would have meant something they could fix. Other causes are likely treatable but not fixable.

In another blow, all of my liver enzymes were higher than they were three weeks ago. We had been praying for them to go down, which would make a chemo reaction more likely. But they went up. However, unexpectedly, my oncologist was still optimistic and hopeful that things would look better at my next appointment, when we would see that it was a treatment reaction after all. 

So we're joining him in the hope that my body just needs a full six-week vacation to get itself in a better place. But my body sure isn't making it easy to hope. The latest development is that it seems like more fluid (ascites) is leaking into my abdomen, much more than what was there before. In fact, I feel like I swallowed a balloon! It makes it hard to breathe deeply, and some of my abdominal organs feel squished.

Thankfully, there's a little procedure I can get to drain off the fluid. I'll go in tomorrow (Friday) morning. If you can, I'd love prayers for the procedure and for it to work for a long time. And that they finally find out what's going on.