April 30th - May 5th, 2012

On April 30th, we went and met with Dr. Goff. He said from what he could see from the CT scan that the tumor is a thymoma which 90% of thymoma cases are benign. He said a biopsy wouldn't be a good idea because there was the risk of spilling cells into other parts of the body and that the best option would be to do surgery and attempt to remove the tumor completely. We were relieved to hear that Dr. Goff was thinking it would be as easy as that. We scheduled surgery for May 4th at McKay-Dee.

On May 4th, I went into surgery.  From what Dr. Goff, Gloria, and my Dad told me, when they went in to remove the tumor it was different than what the CT scan showed and so they biopsied it and sent it to pathology. Pathology immediately said they were not sure what kind of tumor this was and needed a larger sample so Dr. Goff retrieved a fairly large size of the tumor to be analyzed.  Without knowing the type of tumor and what they were dealing with, Dr. Goff had no choice but to close me up and end the surgery. Looking back I believe the Lord's hand was in this as well because had they only biopsied the tumor they still would have had to perform surgery because of the size of sample needed and so that is why I believe Dr. Goff thought it was a regular thymoma. The news that Dr. Goff did give me on Saturday May 5th, is that the tumor is malignant, and that we'd have to wait until next Friday for the results. In the meantime, I was recovering from surgery and what a great feeling to get the chest tube and drains out of me.