Surgery: check!

Hello everyone! This is Hannah. One of my dad's biggest requests was to update everyone on the blog. As we learned from when I was sick, people like to be updated on progress and if we forget to update, people assume the worst.

Surgery went as well as they hoped it would. They made the incision at 8:56 yesterday morning and he was out sometime around 4 in the afternoon. Jason, our friend and anesthesiologist, was so helpful and texted my mom updates throughout the whole thing. Here's all the information I gathered from the doctors: They got the tumor, along with 4 ribs and the cartilage in the lining of his sternum. The margins are wide and clear (meaning the area around the tumor, so there is a pretty big hole in his chest now). They had to take skin and muscle from his abdomen and rotated the muscle up from his abdomen to his chest to cover where the tumor was. They reconstructed his abdomen with a mesh. It was a long surgery and will be an even longer recovery. They think they got all of the tumor! Yay!

We got to see him after surgery in the ICU, two at a time, and it was weird seeing my dad like that. The tubes and wires coming out of him weren't alarming for me at all. My dad does not drink, so I have never even seen him a little tipsy. Obviously he was heavily medicated, so he was a little loopy. His eyes were looking all over the place and even going a little cross-eyed. That's what was strange. Seeing my dad not totally "with it."

He had a good night, got a little nauseous but is better now. Hopefully in a few hours he will be transferred out of ICU and into his regular room.

Keep the prayers coming! It's going to be a painful recovery, but nothing us Cobley's can't handle. The support and love we feel is overwhelming.