Sunday, June 13, 2010

Tumor Free...Again

Ben is very good at many, many things. He is an excellent teacher, a food enthusiast, design junkie, husband, father, scholar, gardener, driver, linguist, an avid reader, and tumor grower.
When Ben was 15 he had a tumor removed from his neck.
When Ben was 21 he had 5 tumors removed from his neck.
Now Ben is 28 and he just had 4 tumors removed from his neck.
His poor neck!

Here he is in his before shot sporting the surprisingly cozy and sterile paper gown with built in warming system (the gown can be plugged into a hair-dryer type contraption for instant warmification).

Here he is perky and happy afterwards. They used dermabond on the incision so he only had 2 stitches on the ends. The surgery went well. One of the tumors was between the jugular vein and carotid artery. The Dr. said it took about an hour to carefully remove that tumor. The Dr. had a bit of a triumphant glow about him and I believe I would too if I had just done something of that magnitude!
The other tumors ran down along his neck.

And a few hours later, viola! Home again, home again, jiggity jig! Don't get me wrong, it hasn't been that easy, Ben has been taking it easy all week and trying to let his body heal. He is quite sore and stiff (although he doesn't admit to it, but shows it by going and having a rest for a few hours). We have been extremely blessed and things have gone better than expected. Thank you all for your support and prayers!

We haven't gotten the pathology reports back yet, but all of the previous tumors have been benign and the Dr. seemed confident that these would be too. We'll keep you posted!
Thank you Nellie and Michelle for watching our kids and thank you to all of you who offered!

7 comments:

Dave said...

Among his other accomplishments listed, you forgot to mention he rocks the black dress socks and the hospital gown like a champ.

Glad to hear everything went well!

Aaron & Michelle said...

Wow! YOu guys have been so calm through all of this. WE loved watching your kids. They are do precious. Glad everything went well. Love you.

teac77 said...

Glad everything went ok!

-Robert

Melinda said...

Scary, scary! So glad things went okay!

Arian Goodman Johnson said...

Wow, I certainly wasn't expecting to read something like this today. What a blessing that he keeps coming through it so well. You guys have such great attitudes about it! Take care-

Jen said...

Oh wow! I'm so glad things went well with the surgery!

ellsworth family said...

Glad everything went well!
Love you,
~Kersten