Biopsy?

August 26, 2004

The surgery team made a decision this afternoon to change the plan slightly. Tomorrow's surgery will go on as scheduled, but the goal will be biopsy, not resection. Apparently, there is a fairly large amount of variability when it comes to removing sarcomas. Some types do best if the surgeon takes out two or more centimeters of healthy tissue all the way around the mass. With others, you can safely get by removing much less healthy tissue. Since this tumor is right on her vertebrae, the surgeon doesn't want to remove a lot of healthy bone if he doesn't have to. This way we can possibly avoid having to have bone reconstruction, which would mean having Erin in a cast or back brace for a couple of months and probably extensive physical therapy.

That's the up side. The down side is that it most probably means a second surgery in a week or two.

The parameters of that surgery would be defined by what the pathologists turn up in the biopsy. Apparently, we are still winning the game of "stump-the-doc." For instance, the bone scan shows no abnormalities at all in the spot, but the doctors would expect some sort of bone involvement based on what they see in the MRI and CT.

Tomorrow's surgery should be pretty straightforward and relatively quick. We will probably spend a night or maybe two in the hospital. I doubt if we will have pathology reports before the end of next week.