A Bit of a Medical Mess

On the 20th of Dec. Keri and Neal found out that her body scans came back with something questionable in the spine. That was a bit unnerving. We scheduled a biopsy for the 23rd and prayed that we would be comforted and have peace during our Christmas. Our Heavenly Father generously granted that. We knew despite the results, we were enjoying Christmastime with family and were not emotionally upset during that time.

The biopsy involved sedation while they scanned a targeted area of my spine (T4 vertebrae), carefully placed a needle into the marrow and sucked out some cells for study. It was a painless procedure. Keri only felt pressure. And we luckily had a great supply of pain killers from this crazy year to use after the surgery. The surgeon said there was approximately a 50/50 chance of fracture doing this type of biopsy but we ended up on the safe side.

After waiting through Christmas, we finally went in for the results on Dec. 27th and found out that it was not cancer! Yippee! It was some sort of abnormality from possible trauma to that area. Keri could not remember any specific problems with that area of her back so we are glad we played it safe and got the information we needed.

If you are family or close friends reading this and wondering why we did not tell you, it is because we did not have all the information we needed, we did not want to upset anyone over Christmas, and we did not want to think too much about it ourselves. Instead we had a great Christmas, our family and friends did too, and we found out later that it was nothing.

Although we don't enjoy going through things like this, we know it will probably not be the last time, and we had the amazing experience of feeling our Heavenly Father's love for us and His peace as we went through it. It was sort of neat that way. However, if Christmas 2011 doesn't have medical events in store, we will not be bummed about that at all.