Hello Friends and Family,

I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to my blog. Having one lobe of your liver removed and part of the other as well as your gall bladder at the same time takes a while to recover from and it is exhausting.
Dr. Curley said the primary side effect of the surgery would be fatigue and he certainly was right about that. After I returned home from my surgery I spent a lot of time resting and not doing anything as I had no energy. It isn't like me to just sit on the couch and not do anything but I found myself there frequently. I would get up in the morning and shower and then go back to bed for a while. Sometimes I would fix breakfast and then sit down and rest for a while. I began working four hours a day the third week after the surgery, usually visiting one of my little ones and then I would come home and take a long nap. So growing your liver back does take lots of rest and also lots of protein. I needed to eat at least 80- 120 grams of protein a day with a low fat,low sugar, good quality diet.That is a lot of protein. I usually ate an egg for breakfast with an almond butter and banana open face sandwich, sometimes adding Greek yogurt. I often had yogurt or cottage cheese for snacks as well as a protein smoothie once a day. Fish and chicken were also part of my diet with salads and veggies and fruit. My husband fixed carrot juice in the morning for me, still does. I also received some good information about Vitamin C and some other supplements that are effective in healing and also fighting cancer.
I took 4,000-6,000 mg. a day of C a day and I do think it helped me grow a healthy liver.
During this recovery time I decided that I would not even consider more Chemo until after I had my first post operative checkup at the end of December. By the middle of October I was back to working full time, having enough energy to handle a 7 hour day and still resting a lot at home. During that time Jared,our son-in-law, came across some research on the chemo drug Avastin, which I had been opposed to from the very beginning because of it's horrible side effects,it was found to have no effect statistically, on colon cancer that first year. I thank my Heavenly Father for guiding my efforts to know what course to follow and the efforts of Brian and Jared and their research. Another interesting bit of research that Brian came upon is that taking a baby aspirin once a day is very effective in the prevention of gastrointestinal cancers.

Because we were scheduled for tests on Dec. 27th in Houston and because all of our children would all be in Utah for Christmas we decided spend our holidays with them.I treasure the time we had with them and with our grandchildren.

I think everyone was feeling a little stressed when we headed for Houston. We spent one pretty full doing blood tests, x-rays and a CT scan. The next day we relaxed and went to several of Houston's museums, and visited the LDS Temple outside of Houston. As we ate dinner and talked I think we were both overwhelmed by what we might hear in the morning. It was a pretty emotional time as we talked about what decisions we might need to make in the morning.
Our appointment was at 8:00 AM, thank goodness, I don't know what we would have done if it had been later in the day. We just wanted to get this visit over with, although I felt at peace about it. Brian on the other hand had doubled his high blood pressure medication for the day and his blood pressure was still not low. Short story short----The good news was they found no cancer with their tests!!!My liver looked great and was back to it's normal size. No mention of getting more chemo either! They will follow up with more tests every four months for the next 2 years,as they want to keep a close eye on things. We cried as we left the office and headed back to our family. We also took the time to thank our Heavenly Father for this wonderful blessing. There were lots of tears as we shared the news with family and friends. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers on our behalf, I have felt the power of them as I have gone through this experience, and I have been blessed and strengthened by them.
I feel like I have been given a new lease on life, time to focus on somethings I need to, want to, accomplish. I am grateful for some more time, life is precious.

Love you all, Evelyn