Thriving

September 23, 2004

Hello Erin fans! The Buengers are thriving these days. Davis had open house at the high school on Monday, and we got to meet his teachers, who seem like a lively and interesting bunch (but perhaps easily fooled--they were quite complimentary of our number one child). Erin's open house is tonight, and she is already bursting with pride to show us around her school (we won't remind her that we have attended open house there seven times already--six time with Davis and once with her).

The Knights (Erin's soccer team) played their first game last Saturday in rather brutal heat. Josh got his first goal ever, and everybody else ran around with the ball and without it until the sweat was flowing like rivers. Erin played T-Rex and Raptor (which, for you soccer fans out there, on our team means sweeper and stopper, respectively) and was quite bold at stepping up and stopping the offensive flow.

The sweet D'Anna and Shirlene (two mothers of knights) brought birthday surprises (cupcakes and chocolate-dipped pretzels) for yours truly and the rest of the team to last night's practice. Thank you ladies for always going out of your way to do nice things!

We have somewhat new information on the medical front. We got the final, amended pathology report last Thursday. The pathologists have labeled a component of the sample "cellular and atypical" rather than malignant, and the rest of the sample is benign--mainly "reactive fibroblastic proliferation with some areas of hyalinization and benign chondroid-like material." We received an addendum today with the results of the cytogenetic G-banding tests. The doctors still can't tell what kind of tumor Erin has or even if it is benign or malignant. The tumor cells do, however, have several genetic abnormalities. This has led everyone to conclude that it is best just to remove it.

Frankly, Walter and I thought this was going to be the case. As many of you know, Erin had originally been scheduled for a resection. When the plan changed to biopsy, the doctors hoped that they would discover a benign tumor that would possibly go away on its own. Now they are not willing to trust that to happen. The surgeons have not yet scheduled a date, but I suspect it will be next week or possibly the week after. Of course, I will let you all know.

Thank you for caring enough to drop by and read our story.