We got some good news today. Amanda’s cyst is not cancerous. Like I said before, it wasn’t likely to have been, but knowing that for sure is definitely a comforting thought. Once we got that information in I sent out the following e-mail to a bunch of people:
Hi everyone. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Amanda went to the lady doctor on Wednesday and it was discovered that she has a large ovarian cyst that will need to be surgically removed. They took some blood work to find out whether or not it’s cancerous and we just got the results back. They said it looks to be normal, although she has a slightly higher-than-normal level of Prolactin, which is indicative of pregnancy (which I think the gynecologist would have noticed) or a tumor. Again though, it was said to be only a little above normal, and that’s something that will be checked again once everything else is taken care of as removal of the cyst may help that out.
Other than that, Amanda has an appointment with an oncologist on Monday morning at 9:30, presumably to discuss the surgery and things like that. At this point we don’t know how complex of a procedure it is, whether it’s inpatient or outpatient, how invasive it is or anything else.
Everyone we’ve talked to so far has been extremely supportive and we appreciate the all thoughts and prayers to help get us through this.
I got a call from Polly Clawson, our small group mentor, not long after that. She prayed with me over the phone. Polly is definitely a gifted woman. Her prayer hit home with me, asking the Lord for so many of the things that we needed and knowing some of my very thoughts. She almost had me in tears, to be honest.
I picked Mike up from work again today. I was on the phone with a client past the time I had intended to leave trying to help them with an e-mail issue. Harvey did a good job of getting in his crate with me just gesturing to him, but I did get off the phone briefly in order to get out to the car and text Mike that I was on the way before getting back on and finishing up with her.
I got a lot of stuff caught up at work this afternoon, which is good considering how busy things have been with my boss, Scott Hendrix, on vacation with his family this week.
I’d meant to pick up some dog food (which we ran out of this morning) while I was out with Mike, but I didn’t so Amanda stopped by and got some on her way home from work. She didn’t sleep well Wednesday night but she did sleep better last night, and she was in a much better, more accepting mood today. After she got home we got ready to go to Blake and Stephanie Konny’s place for a gam night. I told Mike earlier that we were going over there, and they ended up with a late invite as well. (Blake had texted the invite to a wrong number before.) They were going to go eat some half-priced sushi at Hiro’s, so we joined them for that although Amanda and I split an order of Chicken Teriyaki.
Kyle called while we were on the way out. I guess he’d just gotten the e-mail and wanted to express that he was glad of the news. He and Lorin had been invited to Blake and Stephanie’s too (we’d suspected as much when they mentioned Wednesday that they had plans for tonight), but Lorin had a migraine so they had to cancel. The Boscaljons followed us over to the Konnys’ place, although Amanda and I had just a little trouble remembering exactly where they lived. We were really close, just one block off.
We had a great time at Greg and Stephanie’s. It was them, us, Mike and Kaitlyn, another couple we’d met last time at their place and another two couples we hadn’t met yet. We all talked for a bit, munching on Puppy Chow and Rice Crispy Treats until we moved to the living room area to play Blake’s Game.
Okay, I’ve mentioned Blake’s Game a few times now, so I guess I should explain what it is. You split into two teams (it’s been guys versus girls every time we’ve played so far) and everyone gets a few scraps of paper (three is the default) and on it you write the name of someone that everyone knows. Dead or alive, real or fictional, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s someone that people should know.
From then on you take turns having someone on one team then the other pull the paper from a hat or a bowl or what have you. They then have a certain amount of time to get people to guess the name on the paper. There are three rounds, and each round is over when you run out of names to draw. In the first round you can say anything to make people guess the name except for parts of their name, spelling it out or saying "rhymes with." In the second round you can’t say any words and have to charade it out. In the third round you only get to say one single word.
Needless to say, it’s a lot of fun. We played two games of it. In one the girls won by one point (a first- the ladies winning!), although in our defense they went first and on our last go we only had three names left. For the second game we put in more names and in the final round we used ALL the names from both games. In the second game we stomped the ladies.
One odd thing that tends to happen is that multiples always occur. For some reason there were four Mary Poppins, two Henry Fords, two Freddie Mercuries, two David Crowders and I think a couple others.
By the way, Blake’s Game is so named because Blake introduced it to us and had heard it called a couple different names, so I said we would just called it Blake’s Game.
A few people left after that and those of us who remained played Scattergories. Not to brag, but I won that pretty handily. I think Amanda came in second. We’re apparently earning a reputation as players because of that and in Blake’s Game we both tore it up.
Amanda and I were the last to leave. She wanted to tell them about her situation and after we did Stephanie said a prayer for us, which was very touching of her to do.
We came home after that and were going to watch either a DVD or something on HBO On Demand. We decided to do an HBO On Demand movie, but the cable’s picture was out. The guide came up fine, just not the television picture. Amanda called Time Warner Cable but was on hold long enough for us to have reset the cable box and let it reboot before we got through. That fixed it, so we started to watch The Fountain but we didn’t get into it. Amanda went on up to bed and I caught up on this.
Amanda talked to Amy Farmer today to tell her about what’s going on, and she told her brother tonight. She didn’t want to tell him anything until she knew a bit because she knows that he’s a bit of a worrier and didn’t want to put him through that.
On a side note, I heard Clark Howard talking on the radio today about how Denmark has so much wind-generated power that sometimes it overloads their system so they’re selling off excess power and are thinking about going all-electric with their automobiles. Apparently the US has more wind-generated power than they do, but we’re so much bigger that it’s a miniscule blip on the energy grid. Despite this, I think there should be a huge push to go to wind and solar power which in turn could help us go to electric cars. That would get rid of the argument that using electric cars still pollutes because of where the power is derived. I think things would just be so much better if the whole world did that. I mean, there are a lot of countries emerging and starting to use more and more power. Why not go ahead and get them started off clean, you know?
Just some thoughts I had.
Zach Dotsey