Friday's Finale & Dr. DeVera

With the excitement of graduation over, Friday wasn't the fun finale of the week, but one that certainly reminded us all of the challenges that lie ahead as mom was scheduled for her pre-op visit with her surgeon and anesthesiologist.

Unfortunately, it didn't have a very smooth beginning when we are running just a couple of minutes late and Margaret calls us from the doctor's office and proceeds to tell us that the appointment is cancelled because the offices have a power outage!  What?  Indeed, when we arrived just a couple of minutes later, there was a dark office and a hand written sign on the door saying appointments would be rescheduled due to a power outage.  

This. Is. Not. Acceptable.  Ugh.

The good news was that the system has a different medical facility nearby where they were able to send mom.  The doctors met her there instead of their regular office.  It was pretty busy with the facilities own patients as well as the redirected folks like us.  Frankly, expecting a longer wait, we ended up getting seen by the docs and out the door sooner than it would have been at the other office!  There's a bright side!

Mom met with an anesthesiologist and answered all his intake questions.  He may or may not be her doc, those assignments take place on Monday.  Then Dr. DeVera was in to visit and discuss the surgery.  If all goes as originally planned, we'll be looking at the Whipple procedure I previously posted details about.  

Since we're doing this blog and can post photos, mom wanted to be sure you all could meet her surgeon, Dr. Michael DeVera, so here you go!  And don't you love the somewhat appropriate shirt mom's got on, "Even Better Live"? ;)  

This weekend I headed back home to take care of a few things and visit my fur children before taking off again and heading back down tomorrow afternoon.  On Sunday, after church, Mom is planning to spend some time with Margaret and her girls watching her four-footed grand-dogs compete in dock diving competitions at the outstanding local Country Kennels Dawg Waterpark in Murrieta.  If you're anywhere near there, this is a great dog park!  Veya has been quite the jumper and Bo gives her best...thanks for the correction, Margaret...and good luck to you all! :)

Monday will bring us together again for a small family brunch before I drive mom in for surgery on Tuesday morning...arrival time is 5:30am instead of what we originally understood to be 3am, whew!   Stay tuned...I'll keep you as up to date as I can as quickly as I can.

Graduation day!

Thursday, May 29 2014 was Ryan Stewart's graduation from Fallbrook High School.  Ryan is the first of the two grandsons to graduate and this was a day Nan did not want to miss.  In fact, this was the reason the surgery is June 3 instead of last week!

The principal apparently told the parents that the ceremony starts at 6pm sharp and will be done by 6:57.  I was an unbeliever...but low and behold, they finished at 6:56pm.  Wow...and whew... especially since we'd already been there for nearly two hours so we could get seats that lined up with his!  It was thankfully a relatively cool day with a comfortable breeze, at least as the weather goes down here.  The only challenge was sitting on the "home" side of the stadium ...facing the sun for almost 3 hours...hence the family in shades! :)

We we all pretty proud of him...and next year, he'll be a Ute as he is heading to University of Utah.

Before the graduation festivities, there were hi-larious feasting festivities at Margaret's house.  No visual documentation is yet available, but video will be coming!  Let's just say that Margaret thought it might be fun to try to do one of those skits with human hands and arms feeding dogs...like the one's you've seen on the interwebs where the mellow dogs sit and calmly eat what the hands feed.  Yeah, well...if you've ever met Margaret's dogs, calm and mellow would not be the first adjectives to describe them!  Mom played Bo and Margaret played Veya, and almost lost a finger in the making! (Not really, but she may still have a small chomp bruise)  Quite funny in a whole different sort of way...we're still chuckling...hope to show it to you soon!

Family Fun

This Memorial Day week has been a family gathering of sorts...for a couple of reasons.  First, the graduation of the first grandson, son, nephew - Ryan Stewart - from high school.  Mom's surgery specifically scheduled so that she would be able to attend...a most important consideration. :)  This is the same Ryan that only 4 years ago had his C4 & C5 vertebrae broken in a home plate diving tag (Ryan was the catcher...but he got him out!)  He's now a strapping young man and at 6'3" has won the Stewart height record from his Aunt Heather.  Guess which one he is in this photo? ;)

The other, and obvious reason, is we're focusing on family time this week.  Heather drove down from San Francisco on Saturday and there have been a number of adventures all week, which you can see pictures as we get them ready added to the slide show in the right side blog menu.  We encourage you to click on it to take a look.

It started Sunday with Nan being welcomed in as a new member to her church, Spirit of Joy and then we went and enjoyed a fun breakfast with Lana and Mary.  That afternoon, Nan and Heather went shopping to gather the fixin's for the frittatas to be prepared for brunch the next morning.

Monday was a lovely family brunch and photo session day, one you'll see reflected a lot in the slideshow!  Tuesday was the adventure up the mountain to Idyllwild and our beloved Skyland Ranch.  Skyland is a Girl Scout camp that mom took many trips up with her GS troops with Margaret in the troop and me as a leader helper.  Then, I was later both a camp counselor the summer of 1981 and, a couple years later, asked to join the Greater Long Beach Girl Scout Council as staff to develop new troop and other programs that would keep the property in use since it could no longer afford to operate a resident camp.  It was there, thanks to a volunteer, that I learned about the major called Recreation and spent 4 years at Skyland loving her and developing programs that lasted for many years.  So mom and I shared our fond memories of this wonderful place.

On Wednesday, the family and our friend Jenny went sailing on San Diego Harbor!  One of Nan's "bucket list" activities was that she wanted to sail with me again.  Well, I made that happen and we had a terrific day!  The women headed out before lunch and the boys joined in a little later in the afternoon.  The wind cooperated well sometimes, and sometimes we used just a little extra help from the iron wind generator (that would be the motor ;)  Since all she did was sit around and enjoy the day, toward the end, we even got Nan onto the helm of the sailboat to make her do some of the driving! ;)  Margaret was the "official" photographer and her pictures will be added soon, but she and Jenny and I were all taking various photos on our phones and posting to Facebook as we sailed...ah technology!

Today is graduation day and I'm sure will be another proud moment for all of us...and sure to be more pictures coming from that too!

Nan is hanging in there...some days or parts of days better than others.  She's got some pain and tires pretty easily sometimes, but she does her best to rest and work through it...she's an avid solitaire player on her iPad to help focus through the pain...another yeah for technology! ;)  She's reading your comments both on Facebook and on this blog and is appreciating every one of them...thank you!

Welcome to A New Way for Nan

What is this blog and why are you here?  Well, it's likely that you know Nan Stewart and maybe you asked her how she's doing.  Maybe when you mentioned that you'd like to know about how she's doing, she gave you this website link to follow for the best way to get more info to check in on her.  Or, maybe you are friends with one of her kids and we gave you the link, because frankly, it'll be easier for us to keep you all up to date with what's up and what we know...in one single place.

First...for those who don't know all the details, the punch line is...Nan's got pancreatic cancer.

Now, as of this date, they're not 100% positive and won't be until they do surgery...but let's call it about 98% sure.  It's been a long road getting to this time and it's been a bumpy, roller coaster of a ride...not one of those kind you want to ride again any time soon.

It started in February 2014 with a pain in her gut that wouldn't go away.  A CAT scan indicated she had a mass on her pancreas and called it "worrisome".  Then she got the MRI and they saw no mass, but they saw an enlarged bile duct.  Negative testing kept pointing to the possibility of something else, but still, she felt pretty awful and her body wasn't behaving normally...some days worse than others...but some textbook type symptoms if one reads up on this type of cancer.  On top of all that...some pretty stupid insurance situations arising.

Then, on March 10, mom felt so bad that she took herself to the emergency room in Murrieta.  As it turned out, she was quite jaundiced...a sure indicator something isn't right with the bile duct!  More tests there confirmed some of the earlier tests with regards to a mass and bile duct issues and she was now to be scheduled as an inpatient to undergo an EUS, an Endoscopic Ultra Sound that would be able to go into the pancreas to take a biopsy.  They also placed a stent in the duct to help clear the jaundice and get that all flowing again.  She had been waiting as an outpatient to get scheduled for this particular procedure, but nothing was happening.  Now as an inpatient, she got a higher priority for getting this done.  However, more insurance ridiculousness ensued and they sent her out of her health care system to UC Irvine for the procedure they ended up having to specially contract for...all to end up being denied continued work with them and be transferred back to her system and a whole new set of doctors...who she's got to meet and consult with all over again to get the same basic answers and where they could have done the procedure all along and gotten started with any treatment several weeks earlier!  Much more frustration with that and several other insurance related issues, all to come back around to now...a new way forward.

Inertia had been broken and a plan developed.  She met with her surgeon and has had all the hard conversations with him and her family and she has clearly decided she wants to fight with this surgery...as she shared with me, she's a "feisty old lady"...which is good, because she'll need that attitude to deal with and struggle through successfully with all that's coming next...this new way.

The current plan is surgery will be on Tuesday, 3 June in Loma Linda...after arriving at 3am to check into the hospital! (Who checks into a hospital at 3am???...we do!)  The definitive decision will be made after the surgeon opens her up, they take a large sample of the mass for the pathologist to test and confirm cancer.  If the mass is resectable, the surgeon will then move to performing a pancreatoduodenectomy, commonly called the Whipple procedure.  This YouTube from Johns Hopkins has a great explanation of exactly what mom's been dealing with, what the procedure is all about and a bit about the ideal recovery situation.  It's almost 10 minutes long, but it explains it better than any of us can and I strongly encourage you to take a look!

It is highly unlikely that she will be up for visitors any time before day 3 at least, anticipating all will be going well.  Therefore, I will make every effort to keep this blog as up to date as I can with the latest information...in as brief a fashion as this first one may not be. :)  In lieu of visits until she's able, we absolutely welcome all comments made on this blog...they will all be read to her and otherwise shared directly.

In offering this tool to her to keep others informed, we worked on picking a the title for this blog...A New Way for Nan...because that's certainly what it will be.  A new way of moving through this world and beyond, to whatever comes next.  And what she would really like to share with you all at this point is that she knows all the "bad" stuff, but she is choosing to be positive and optimistic. She's keeping her positive attitude and asks for others to have the same for her.  She plans on staying in there to fight and will need your thoughts, prayers and support to help her through.  She's got a strong faith and asks for others to keep the faith and love strong for her...and she thanks you ahead of time for all of it.