Big week

This has been a big week around here.
First I got to come home from the hospital - which is awesome.
Then I got my drains out on Wednesday which helped a great deal with pain/pulling/etc.
Thursday Eric's mom left to return home. And yes, all greatly miss her and I have no idea bow we would have even survived until now without her here to help! I was also able to (finally) take a shower which felt super amazing! Thursday I was also able to drop down to a less powerful pain medicine. Which is good because they all wanted me off the old medicine ASAP.
And Friday, we received the pathology report from the doctor.

It's more or less said what we expected. And yet somehow getting it in writing seemed, well, I don't know - strange, sad, relieving, good, weird, etc, etc.

Anyway, the big news from it is I am stage 3 cancer. We knew it was at least stage 2, and I had hoped it would stay stage 2, but alas, 3 it is. The tumor was just over 10 cm. My understanding (which is still pretty limited) is that this is pretty large. They pulled 7 lymph nodes out. We had guessed that at least one had cancer in it. However 5 tested positive for cancer. This is the part that shocked me the most.

This isn't much different than what we thought, other than more lymph nodes involved. Treatment will be mostly what we thought it would be - chemo and radiation. I was secretly hoping the lymph nodes would end up being clear and so radiation would be taken off the table, but i knew that was pretty wishful thinking.

Anyway, it's been a big week, but overall a good week. :)