Game Time

This is Derrik. (I know, sorry)

It's go time!

First things first, can you believe how great Nicole looks with her new haircut? I love it. I won't lie, I'm super excited to see her with a buzzed head. She looks great with all hairstyles so why not try them all??

Starting from the top of today:

We forgot Nicole's wallet this morning so we had a 15-minute delay in going back and get it. We were still good on time until we hit two traffic-stopping wrecks in North Salt Lake. We were only 7 minutes late so it was fine.  As a side note: If I ever become absurdly wealthy I'm going to buy tons of billboards and TV commercials to explain how freeway lanes work.  In the meantime, this will work:

In preparation for surgery, they rolled Nin into the radiology lab to map her "Sentinel Lymph Node". They used this radioactive compound called Lymphoseek (look it up, it's pretty cool) which uses a radioactive dye that will travel to the lymph node(s) in charge of the breast tissue affected by the tumor. It's pretty interesting how it works. Some guy somewhere in the world thought, "If I added a nuclear radiation compound to this formula, it would know the exact path to travel to identify lymph nodes affected by cancerous tumors." Meanwhile I'm over here thinking, "How can I sell some toothbrushes? Or when does Game of Thrones start back up?" I was clearly not blessed with special cognitive abilities. Enough about my instabilities though, back to Nicole.  Here is a picture of her getting scanned. The light spots on the screen are where she was injected with the radioactive dye. In the boob.

Next the Plastic Surgeon came in and drew a very intricate connect the dots all over her chest. I'm excited to connect the dots with my sharpie after surgery. I bet it's a unicorn. Sorry, no picture of Nin to accompany that part. Here is a picture of what the unicorn might look like though:

They rolled her back at 12:30 and estimate the surgery will take about 6 hours. The general surgeon will take about two hours then will come out to update me and most importantly to share the pathology results from her lymph nodes. Praying that the cancer has not spread to them.

I just have to say how insanely proud I am of Nicole. She has been so strong and brave through this whole process. I've probably watched her comfort more people than have had to comfort her. These have easily been the hardest few weeks of her life and she has taken it in stride. She's so positive and optimistic that it's contagious. But don't worry, the cancers not contagious. Maybe wash your hands after touching her though, just in case.

They will keep her in the hospital until Friday (FriYAY anybody?). Maybe you're a burglar reading this blog and are thinking "Perfect, I'll go burgle them while they're in the hospital." Well, the joke would be on you because we have security cameras, a dog comparable to "the beast" from The Sandlot movie, armed house watchers, and broken Christmas ornaments and micromachines all over the floor. You've been warned.

If you can't tell, I'm a visual learner. Well, that's enough rambling and inevitable grammatical errors for one post (see reference to cognitive ability above). I'll try to post another update or two later today when we have more news.

Love you bye.