Lisa's mom, Lenelle, arrived yesterday and will be staying with us to help for awhile.  We're to be at the hospital at 8am, with the surgery tentatively scheduled for 10am.   This is a full anesthesia outpatient surgery rather than just sedation, so there will be a longer post-op recovery before going home, but hopefully that will be by about 1pm.

Update:  They finally have rolled her in to surgery around 11:15am.  Meanwhile, I got a call from the Cancer Center, and Lisa's first radiation treatment is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at 2:30pm, and will be at that time every weekday for the next month.

Update 12:00: Lisa made it through surgery fine.

Update 1:30: She will be in recovery longer because they had to administer a "breathing treatment". Also, we are now to go by the Cancer Center and bring Lisa in for a pre-treatment on our way home from the hospital rather than wait for it all to start tomorrow.

Update 4:30:  All is well, and we're back home.  Lisa is feeling pretty good at the moment, other than her cough and finding it difficult to talk much.

Lisa had been complaining over the last several days about her head feeling full and swollen and heavy, the veins in her neck slightly extended, and finding it difficult to swallow, but we knew from the most recent scans there there was no problem with the cancer in the head or neck.  We thought it might be further related to the irritation of the vagus nerve, but our the cardio-pulmonary surgeon today determined that it was almost certainly due to the pressure by the tumor compressing the vena cava, and in fact it has a name: Superior Vena Cava (SVC) Syndrome. It perfectly fits Lisa's symptoms. After the surgery today, he called our radiation oncologist, so we'll be talking with him tomorrow about it after the radiation treatment.

Michael