How a bad day turned into a very good day

Where do I even begin? My husband had a partial glossectomy and selective neck dissection on Nov. 4th. Recovery was going very well until last night when out of the blue, he bit his tongue pretty hard. After applying pressure with gauze and not getting the bleeding to stop, his doctor advised us to go to the ER. To make a long story short, after 9 hours in the ER and several attempts to stop the bleeding (some of which worked temporarily), my husband went back into surgery this morning at 9 am to cauterize the wound and stop the bleeding. It was a short procedure, only about a half an hour long, and it did the trick. Never have we seen that much blood though, and never have I seen my husband have such a scared look in his eyes. It was truly a frightening experience. His doctor said that bleeding complications can happen, and in the scheme of things, they are easy to fix and not that big of a deal. But we were very scared. my husband is staying overnight at the hospital for observation, but he will be released tomorrow morning.

The interesting thing is that we were supposed to meet our doctor this morning to have my husband's stitches removed from the neck dissection and to find out the results of the pathology report from surgery. Well, when I saw the doctor after surgery, he said that he removed the stitches during surgery (how nice of him...LOL), and that the report was not in as of this morning. But that he would let us know as soon as it was.

This afternoon, I left the hospital to come home and be with our kids, and my husband called because the report was in. The doc will call us to discuss it in more detail, but the main points are that all of the tongue cancer was removed with clean margins as expected and not one of the lymph nodes that was removed from the right side of the neck was cancerous! None! Can you believe it? So now discussion of further treatment will begin. One of our doctor's residents (who was with us all day in the ER and then again in surgery) said they may do radiation or they may not because God forbid it ever comes back there is a limit on the amount of radiation you can do. They may just want to monitor him closely instead. Anyway, the doctor will discuss it more with us.

We just can't believe it. Deep breaths. A bad day ends on a high note. Wow.