This medical adventure suddenly got enormously interestinger today… I missed a call from Dr. Miller this morning, but he left a voicemail message to share with me the preliminary results that came back from the biopsy on the tumor he removed from my jaw on Monday. The results point to the presence of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Not cool in the least.
The surgery on Monday went well enough; got there bright & early at 6:45 & waited for a good half-hour for the staff to get things prepped. The doc came in, put me out, and about two hours later they wheeled me out, minus two teeth and a chunk of my jaw. I don’t remember much of anything of that part or the ride home; I do remember giving the nurses a hard time about not being able to take my teeth home as souvenirs, so they sent me home with a Siouxland Oral Surgery mug as a consolation prize. I’m told that I was pretty chatty on the ride home, but I don’t remember much of that at all; good drugs. I went straight to bed, and woke up a couple hours later feeling pretty beat up. I stayed home the rest of that day and Tuesday as well; went to work on Wednesday though, and it went well, although Yvonne wouldn’t let me drive myself, what with the hydrocodone I had been taking for pain. Today was better still, down to just acetaminophen and ibuprofen for pain; the pain is still there, but tolerable. The biggest issue is the stupid stitches. I hope they fall out soon!
During our initial consultation, Dr. Miller told us that the tumor didn’t appear to be cancerous because cancer generally goes right through a bone rather than consuming/replacing the bone as this one did, so this preliminary diagnosis was a bit of a shock. It kinda makes sense though, considering that the brown tumor is generally a side effect of a problem with the parathyroid, and I suppose that problem could be a result of the lymphoma… Just conjecture at this point, plus this is all based on a preliminary diagnosis. We’re still a week away from the final results of the biopsy.
But that preliminary result was alarming enough to Dr. Miller that he alerted my family doctor & passed the results on to him. The family doc in turn got on the horn with an oncologist right away, and I’m now scheduled to check in at Sanford tomorrow at 1:30 for a CT scan and an MRI. Dr. DeHaan, my family doc, said he was surprised at the finding; he’d never heard of something like that manifesting itself in the jaw, and neither had Dr. Bleeker, the oncologist he referred me to. We’re proceeding as though this is the real deal, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. I’m hoping that preliminary finding is wrong, but I guess it’s best to prepare for the worst.
Since that first call, I’ve been on the verge of tears every time I think about it, not so much for me but for Yvonne, and how she is going to handle all of this. Last weekend she told me that she felt we were heading into a storm, and it’s looking like she was right. She’s working today, so I decided to just wait until she gets home to tell her the news; no sense in wrecking her day at work too.