SCANS, LABS, CHEMO, REPEAT

I was talking to a friend tonight and he asked about Hutton and how she was doing. I said she was doing well, has a scan on Thursday, and what that scan shows will dictate our next steps…Surgeries, chemo, radiation, ALL the things.

I feel like our life is lived scan to scan. Her Thursday scan is the scan her lung surgeon needs to determine when her lung surgeries will be. This scan will also tell us if the cancer in her pelvis has shrunk and if the chemo is working.

We live our lives based on scans. One thing we do know though, is Hutton will not start the school year in the classroom, but her next scan will show us what the next few months will look like.  Will she be able to go to school after Thanksgiving…after Christmas??? We don’t know. One of the things we have learned standing with and next to Hutton has she battles cancer, is that you don’t know what you don’t, know…and even what you do know can change in an instant.

With that said, what we currently DO know,  is she will potentially have 2 surgeries to remove the cancer in her lungs. But after that, we don’t know until we see what the scan shows. We assume we will need to pick up chemo again, but we just don’t know until we see what the scan shows. It’s so, so, so, so, so, incredibly hard to realize that you literally cannot do or plan anything until you have results from a scan. It is not an over exaggeration, we literally have no idea what our life looks like until we get the results back from her scan on Thursday, and then after that, we will have a rough idea, but still, won’t know much more until the results of her next scan, and so on, and so on.

Is she having lung surgery as planned on Monday? We don’t even know that, because we have to wait for the results of her labs to ensure her numbers are high enough to have surgery. Scans, wait, labs, wait, chemo, wait, then repeat, that has been our lives for the past two years and really is one of the only things we know.

We are really just living life day by day never knowing what is coming next, while at the same time, trying to give Hutton some form of normalcy and routine in her daily life, as well as trying to allow her to LIVE her life as much as possible, because we really still, and honestly, do not know. And that is what we try to focus on and show her, to LIVE her life. One thing Jeremy has said, is that if we can do something NOW, something that allows her to LIVE, something that allows her to experience and build core memories, we will just do it and figure out the rest later.