Sandi survived her surgery.
They did a bowel resection, which is where, after opening her up like a nightmare drawstring pouch, they hack out a wedge of the large intestine along with a section of the mesentary. The mesentary has been recognized as a previously unacknowledged organ in its own right; it is a thin fan of tissue that contains blood vessels and numerous lymph nodes.
It has to be done this way because of the modular nature of how the intestine is fed blood; fan-like spreads of veins and arteries splay out in discrete groups, and a whole group has to be taken at once so that the remaining ends will be fully supplied with blood when they are sewn together to fix the plumbing, as it were.
"Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably needles and sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures. Oh, the terrible pain!" - Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek, 'The City On The Edge Of Forever' after appearing in 1930's earth
After she woke up, she kept falling asleep again, the result of the anesthesia and pain medications, and when she was conscious, reported having quite an extraordinary, reoccuring dream. It is worth sharing with you, because it is kind of impressively delusional. It should be noted that she fully understood that this was a dream, that it was not real. Sometimes, she would report the dream while in it, asleep, yet talking cogently.
In her dreams, multiple sequential dreams, the Marvel universe - which she does not enjoy, by the way - movies or comics - has a interuniversal beachhead in our universe. Somehow she had inadvertantly been made part of a secret effort to merge our universe with theirs, because she had, in the past, purchased food from a local Wendy's, which was one of multiple intercosmic portal locations (another being at the Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon). Paying the bill somehow put a special app on her phone, which would allow contact with those behind the portals - which was probably not good, since the whole thing was secret.
Somehow, this app existed outside timespace, so that when she was in her dream, she could astral project to the Marvel universe, where she found herself in a large but empty complex. The building was vast, and made of a strange, red stone that did not appear to be of ordinary human manufacturing technology. The empty, aching halls of the brutalist architecture had little in them, except for one hall having a sort of stage or performance/speaking area in the back, and another, a sort of central hub, which was filled with gigantic and ordinary sized holographic flat screens, and panels of touch controls that she could not fully understand how to use. She found only one hall with people, in it were five humanoids sitting in a circle, lost in a telepathic trance so powerful she could feel it from a distance. I jokingly suggested that would probably be the work of Professor Xavier, considering his powers, and she agreed; for a woman who hates Marvel, or so she claims, she sure knows a lot about it.
She kept expecting that I would be able to see these scenes too "How much of that did you get? Did you see that?" I would answer no, and she would be sad "Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad."
When she was fully awake, which was not for long, she could see images in the walls and ceilings, faintly superimposed. The most common were a constantly scrolling text, like the end credits of a movie, running in white letters against the greige-colored walls of her hospital room. Among the credits included
Ethan Allen.... Furniture and
Forsythe Determinations.... Development
Very strange, but compellingly self-consistent stuff. It would make a truly terrible science fiction book.
There is a vertical silver pad-like strip, covered with wide transparent tape, that runs from the top of her crotch to the middle of her chest. That is the suture line, the place where they sliced her open. She began to start to feel little bits of pain from that; I know the next three to five days are going to be rough.
The mass they took out of her, riding her colon, was large, at least the size of a fist. Hopefully not a Marvel sized fist. We won't know if it was cancer or not, or what type, or what stage, for at least three days, and possibly five. The reason is that the tissues have to be stained with various dyes, then studied under a microscope. One thing they will be checking is the lymph nodes in the mesentary. The presumed cancer (as one doctor put it "Something that large? What else could it be? I can't think of anything, so..." could be self contained. If so, she is Scott Free and safe.
If it spread to one of the lymph nodes, still okay, they got it.
If there is cancer in a chain of lymph nodes, leading through the mesentary towards the core of her body, then... that is bad news. That is metastasis, and that is the worst.
Especially since she has a cirrhotic liver. Not from drinking or drugs - we don't do that. But she was exposed to a really nasty, cancerous chemical when she worked at Ford Aerospace forty years ago, and for the rest of her life she has been told, repeatedly, about the damage to her liver. Ford told her, at the time, that there was nothing to worry about, and exposure to that chemical - for two weeks - was not any sort of problem.
Fuck Ford Aerospace.
If she has to ever get Chemotherapy, her fear has been that she will end up like a friend of hers who died because while the Chemo cured his cancer, it also killed his liver which - likewise - was already damaged. Kind of the problem with Chemo - it kills your cells, too. If you live, your cancer might be cured, but you will always come away with your internal organs horrifically damaged. That damage will be an issue later. It is always an issue, later.
So, in conclusion for now, Sandi lived, and I guess... we shall see for how long that can remain true.
I want to thank everyone for their good wishes and words, that helped during this very dark turn.
I'll do another blog, when we find out the hopefully non-horrible truth of it all, because you deserve closure. I mean, if I am going to splodge out all of this stuff at you, then, naturally, who would not want to know how it all turned out?
I guess we will both know... in around a week.
It is a strange thing, like waiting for a letter from some Governor, to find out if the execution is on, or if the sentence has been commuted.
But right now, I flinch every time the hanging light bulb in the jail corridor flickers and briefly goes out.
