The Longest Day

It has been a very long 24 hours for us. Gordon went to the urologist yesterday morning for a recheck of his bladder. Dr. said everything looked good, no visible recurrence of any of the bladder cancer. They took blood to run a PSA test and urine to send to pathology. Dr. said they would run a preliminary 'quick test' in their office first and would call with those results, but he didn't expect to find anything. Pathology tests would take longer. When we got home the nurse called to tell Gordon the preliminary result of the urine specimen showed "abnormal" cells in his urine. I called her right back to find out more, but she really couldn't tell me anything at the time, stating that the doctor didn't want us to worry about it. ???!! And she said we might not get pathology results until next week! I asked her to tell the doctor that we wanted to talk to him asap. I couldn't believe he would ask her to call us with that kind of information knowing our history. Of course Gordon was upset and I knew he would stress out over it until he had a definitive answer one way or the other. With everything he has experienced this year, he naturally jumped right to the conclusion that his cancer had returned. When the doctor called we were both gone; Gordon was picking up Lucas and some other boys at school and delivering our guinea pigs to their new home, and I was with Sonja at her follow-up appointment with her surgeon. His message was that he wasn't surprised at the abnormal cells since Gordon had "a couple of cancers" in that area (bladder and prostate) this year and the radiation seed implants might also cause an abnormal reading in the test they ran. This didn't do much to calm Gordon's fears, so he didn't sleep last night and has continued to obsess today. Finally, this evening the nurse called back to say the pathology report showed NORMAL results on his urine test. What a relief! Praise God! I think Gordon will sleep like a baby tonight and have a much calmer weekend.

I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving with your families and/or friends, safe travels, and good weather--we need rain. Thank you for your continued prayers.