Jessie Blackburn

Not too much new to report. Still healing after surgery. Still a bit sore, and still dealing with bandages and drains (although fewer). But she's walking a lot and enjoys visits from friends. Feel free to call. And thanks to all of you who provided meals. They were all excellent and we're getting fat. Future events: Meetings with the oncologist at Georgetown to be followed by chemo sometime around Christmas. Nicole is coming in for Thanksgiving tomorrow and we'll all be celebrating with Madeleine and Greg and some friends on Friday night as Mad and Greg are working on Thanksgiving and the next morning (in return for Christmas off.) We visited them today while at JHU for a follow-up appointment. That's about it for now. Thanks again to everyone for your help, best wishes and support. 

Much to the relief of the dogs (and everyone else), Jessie is back home and snuggled in.  Hopkins was great and we were very happy with the doctors and nurses (especially nurse Madeleine who spent the night with Jessie.) Happily, still not too much pain, probably with the help of lots of drugs. But she's still quite tired and not receiving visitors as of yet. Thanks for everyone's support. (And sorry if the "update" emails seem to be lagging a day behind the actual blog updates.)

The patient is out of surgery and settled into her very nice hospital room eating dinner (we sent out for noodles.) The surgery was long (~5 1/2 hours), but it went well. The main surgeon and the plastic surgeon were both happy. Barring anything unexpected, we will be heading home tomorrow morning. 

Short Update: Surgery for a single mastectomy is scheduled for tomorrow. We have to be at the hospital at 9:00 am, but surgery isn't scheduled until 1:00 pm. It's supposed to last 4-5 hours, but who knows? Then overnight in the hospital and home Thursday. Jessie is, as one would expect, nervous, but happy to be taking the first step toward defeating this thing. Unclear yet what the recovery process looks like exactly, but should have more information soon. Thanks all who have signed up for meals. We'll keep you up to date in case we need to delay some if we get overwhelmed with food (or start gaining too much weight.) More later. Thanks again for all of your support. (And maybe while I'm sitting in the waiting room tomorrow, I'll figure out how to fix the comments. Otherwise, feel free to email me and I'll pass along any messages.)

Unless we've run into you in the neighborhood recently, you may not know that Jessie had been diagnosed with breast cancer. It's a fairly rare form of breast cancer -- metaplastic -- which makes it slightly less receptive to common chemotherapy drugs. That's the bad news. The good news is that various body and bone scans have shown no further spread, and we have excellent doctors, so we're very optimistic. Jessie is currently scheduled for surgery on November 13 at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and that will be followed a month later by chemotherapy and then radiation. So we have a fun few months ahead. I'm putting together this blog just to have a place where I can update people on what's going on without overburdening my already overburdened email account (and brain).  It seemed easier than using one of those pre-packaged sick-people websites. There is also a way to leave comments on this, so feel free. Just remember they will be public. And even ...