11. 7/29/2013 - Post-surgery playing at home.

After Hattie went into surgery, Kate and I grabbed some breakfast and went to the waiting area. It helped knowing that a lot of our friends signed up to pray for us throughout the day and our pastor, Garrett Smith, stopped by the hospital to be us while we waited.

We had enough to do that waiting wasn't so bad and surgery went surprisingly quickly. Hattie's surgeon grabbed us and pulled us into a small conference room to go over the results. I had somehow already accepted what he would say before he said anything and felt just completely numb as the words "cancer" and "rhabdomyosarcoma" entered my ears. We walked back to the waiting room in a daze and prayed with Garrett before we were brought back into the recovery room.

We met with the rest of the team as Hattie was waking up from anesthesia. The daze of emotion gave way to a firehose of information. The scans from Friday were clean - that meant that cancer hadn't spread to her lungs or lymph nodes. Huge sigh of relief. The surgeon was able to remove about 99% of the tumor and it looked like textbook rhabdomyosarcoma but pathology would take a couple days for an official diagnosis. Because the tumor looked malignant, the surgeon installed a port-a-cath for ongoing cancer treatment. We’d get all of the final test results, an official diagnosis and a treatment plan at Dana-Farber on Thursday, 8/1.

Hattie slowly woke up and felt good enough for us to head home around noon. She took a long nap and then was up playing at near full speed all afternoon. Surgery and a preliminary cancer diagnosis couldn’t keep her down for long. We again had a few days to wait.