Having spent most of the Monday, October 29th in the ER without permission to eat, Eli requested Daddy’s Special Soup (Adam’s improved version of Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana). While the staff prepared to move Eli to his room on the 4th floor, Adam made a quick trip to Olive Garden to get us food. Eli was pleased to have his favorite soup during the brief time he was allowed to eat, 11pm-midnight, before going to sleep.

Monday, the doctors and nurses had been careful to not actually say he had cancer, leaving open the chance of it being an infection. By the end of Monday, my texts had evolved from “we’re in the ER” to “it’s probably cancer”. Tuesday morning, the surgery team came by to go over the plan for the biopsy. The surgeon explained that he would remove an easy to reach lymph node (apparently the lymph node constricting the blood vessels was too deep to easily remove), do a bone aspirate, and put in a port for delivering chemotherapy medications. Whoa, what? So he already plans on finding cancer in the biopsy? I really, really didn’t want it to be cancer yet, so I asked if they were planning on checking the biopsy for cancer while he was in surgery, because why put a port in if we don’t know that it’s actually cancer? Backpedaling occurred and the surgeon said they’d do a quick test to confirm there were tumor cells before putting in the port, but the test wasn’t specific enough to diagnose the exact kind of cancer that he clearly was planning to find.

Meanwhile, Eli couldn’t eat in preparation for the surgery, which was an “add-on” surgery and would occur when the surgeon could fit it in his schedule. It turns out that school districts in nearby counties had Monday off, so their surgery schedule was quite full, because what else would one do on ones day off of school? Eli didn’t get the day off and I made him do some of his language arts. What better way to distract a starving kid from food than with school work? That’s the beauty of home school, you can torture your kids any time anywhere with learning. It turns out that Eli still remembered he was hungry and talked about his desire for bacon pretty much all day.

He finally had his surgery about 5pm that night. By 7:09pm we were informed that Eli has cancer. We had already put in a request with Eli’s uncle Sam for a plate of bacon for when he came out of surgery.