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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Update on Stephen: {surgery news}

Wow. My heart is SO full of gratitude right now! First, I am so, incredibly grateful for all of your prayers and comments and emails...just, WOW. Thank you so much! I seriously have the BEST group of blog BFF's in the world. We are not only craft friends, we are LIFE friends. :)

Secondly, I am so grateful for God's goodness. I have been stressing out all day, waiting for updates on Stephen's surgery...not expecting good news, but trying to have faith that things would turn out okay. I bit off all of my nails and stress ate an ENTIRE batch of no-bake cookies. Brent put up these pictures of Stephen's MRI scan. Just look at the size of that tumor! :(


Then, later this evening, they put up these pictures. This is Stephen after he came out of surgery. Bless his little heart. He is still sedated, but doing well.


This was Brent's update:

"Just talked to the surgeon. It went great! He estimates he got out 99 percent of the tumor. There was minimal bleeding and no transfusion necessary. Pre-pathology results classify it as a PNET type tumor and pathology will most likely confirm it given a few days of testing.
Stephen will be in ICU sedated and incubated overnight. They will wake him in the morning aver a new scan. Both Amber and I will be able to stay with him overnight. No telling how soon he will get out of ICU, but recovery will be at least a week and maybe two.

We can't tell you how relieved we are and thank each of you for your WONDERFUL support, prayers (across multiple denominations and faiths), fasting, priesthood blessings, karma and whatever else you sent our way!

We are so blessed to have so many wonderful people in our lives.

Of course we are not out of the woods yet, and there will yet be chemotherapy to endure, but we could not have any better news to announce today!"


I have NO doubt in my mind that it was all of the prayers reaching up to Heaven today that brought this WONDERFUL outcome. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! Now...please say one more prayer and THANK Heavenly Father for pouring out his blessings! :)

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4 people leaving some love!:

Unknown said...

oh my goodness!!! Finally I'm crying happy tears!! Such wonderful news!! SO happy for all of you!

Emily @ RemarkableHome said...

so glad he made it through! That is great news!

Angela said...

Praise God!

Gaylynn said...

Natalie,
I don't believe we've met, but I'm Amber's oldest sister. I found your blog posted on a bulletin board by your sister in law, Kathy.

Thank you so much for putting Stephen's story out there so that more people could pray for him. He is such a blessing in our family and we are so grateful that the surgery was such a success. Thanks for doing what you're doing to help with the bills.

I saw Stephen yesterday afternoon. He's amazing everyone with how well he's recovering. Brent and Amber are exhausted of course, but when I left and told them to "hang in there", Brent said, "We are. We at least now feel like we have all our fingers on the cliff, instead of hanging on with our pinky fingernails".

They all still need our prayers, of course, but I truly believe that we have witnessed a miracle in the past few days and am so grateful to Heavenly Father!

~Gaylynn Stroupe, ABQ, NM