Amy's 'momentary trouble'

This BLOG is dedicated to my wife Amy, she is my inspiration, my love, my best friend.

My name is Vince and I am writing this on behalf of my wife Amy. I work in operational and technical computer support for a major dairy cooperative in Wisconsin and Amy is a substitute teacher. We have 4 children; Brittany is 15, Trevor is 13, Vinny is 9 and Hope is 5. Brittany loves to sing and plays tennis on her high school tennis team. Trevor loves sports and actively plays Baseball, Basketball and Football, he loves the Boston Redsox and dreams of playing pro-baseball one day. Vinny is our quiet one, he’s very good at math and loves to watch TV, play video games and is a master of building anything with Lego’s. Hope, while 5 years old, really rules the roost. She may act like it, but isn’t in the least bit shy. She’s a girl through and through and loves to pretend that she’s Cinderella. She has a jar of pennies that she’s saving to ‘take us all to Disney’. I am 42 and Amy is 39.
This past November, Amy started to notice some pain in the upper portion of her stomach. This would come and go and sometimes the pain would be just a bother and others it would be intense. Being a mother and a substitute teacher, she really didn’t think too much of it, thinking that it probably was her Gall Bladder as she has had 2 sisters a brother & an aunt who have all had theirs removed. In December I pushed her into making an appointment to see her doctor and she scheduled an appointment for January 6th. She went in on the 6th of January and had an ultra-sound done and her doctor said that she would review the films and call her back in a couple of days with the results. The next day, the doctor called her back and told her that the ultra-sound revealed that her Gall Bladder was fine, but they also detected a ‘spot’ on her liver and that an appointment had been made for her to have a CT Scan done the next day. She went and had the CT Scan done and that same afternoon, her doctor called to say that the spot on her liver appears to be a benign spot but the CT Scan have revealed a ‘mass’ on her Pancreas and that she is to see a GI specialist the next day. We see the GI doctor and she is very puzzled because Amy doesn’t fit any of the usual precursors to explain why she would have what she called a Intraductal Pancreatic Mucinous Tumor; she isn’t over 60, she doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink alcohol and she isn’t African-American. She goes on to say that based on her age and the size of the tumor, she believes it to be pre-cancerous and that it needs to be removed because some year down the road it will become cancerous. The doctor orders some more tests/scans and this reveals that the tumor is wrapped around the main blood vessels that feed the intestines. At this point, the GI doctor refers us to the surgeon, so we meet with the surgeon and he seems to think that he can handle the tumor wrapped around the vein, but he wants a special scan done that will tell him how far around the tumor is wrapped and along with this scan, the scope can do a fine-needle-biopsy of the tumor. The results of the scan tells us that the tumor is a little more than 50% around the vein, but much more devastating is the news that she has Pancreas Adenocarcinoma (Pancreatic Cancer). Because of the fear that the cancer could spread throughout the body, the surgeon has elected to postpone removal of the tumor. They will put Amy through 6 weeks of intensive chemotherapy along with radiation treatments in hopes that the tumor will shrink enough for them to perform surgery (the surgery would remove most if not all of her pancreas, gall bladder, a portion of her intestine, her bile duct and possibly up to 40% of her stomach.

This is Amy's story as seen and told by me - V