A day on the 8th floor

Last night I spent the evening in the hotel with my mom and Raider and Marla stayed with Ben in the hospital. It was nice to get out of the hospital but it was also extremely hard to be away from Ben. My mom's hotel is a couple blocks away so we decided to walk there. As we were walking we were looking around at all the hospitals in this area. MD Anderson is located in the Texas Medical Complex which consists of many hospitals. The skyline for the Texas Medical Center is actually bigger than Houstons downtown. Anyway as my mom and I were looking around we were realizing how many sick people must be in all these hospitals and how many sick children were in the Children's hospital. It is just so sad to think about all the people in the world who are going through similar situations to us. It also makes you really thankful for your own health. We back to today. This morning Ben had an IVC filter put into his ventrical vein I think. (if you are in the medical field you can probably figure out what I am talking about and if your not it probably doesn't really matter) Anyway the IVC filter is a titanium filter that is place in him to make sure that a blood clot in his leg can not enter his heart or lung. As the post said yesterday they found a blood clot in Ben's lung and they had thought it may have come from a clot in his leg. After the ultrasound yesterday they did not find any clot in his legs. Today Dr. Lavine said that it may have come from his arms but they really don't know and now they are just trying to prevent any more from forming or letting the one he already has grow. The surgery to put in the IVC filter is kinda crazy. They entered through Ben's jugular vein and just slide the filter down until it was in the correct place. Then they just put a bandaid over the area that they entered the jugular vein, no stiches or anything. The rest of the day we just hung out in the hospital room. Dr. Lavine came by this evening to talk with us and just let us know that they are planning to do the biopsy on Monday. It will then take a week to get back the results from the biopsy. After he recieves the results of the biopsy he said he was planning on taking Ben's case to tumor board. Every week all the Neuro doctors get together and present some of there most difficult cases. They all discuss them and come up with ideas for how the patient should be treated. This is called Tumor board and Ben's case is going to be presented on September 18th. This is exciting because we know that the more people who look at his case the better but it is also scary knowing that Ben's case is big enough to make it to Tumor Board. Dr. Lavine said that based on the biopsy and the results of tumor board he will then decide whether he should operate or do radiation and chemo. We are going to need lots of prayers in the next couple of weeks. This whole waiting is scary because the tumor is still there continueing to grow and cause Ben problems. Dr. Lavine said that they also would like to try to discharge Ben soon after the biopsy so he can get up and start moving around and get out of the hospital bed. As exciting as that is once again it is also scary because he will no longer have the monitoring of nurses and doctors which just seems to reassure me. On a good note today my mom found this place in the hospital called the Place of Wellness and they offer free chair massages to all patient family members and full body massages for a small fee. So I think tomorrow I am going to go down there and get a much needed massage.