The Marvelous Mrs. Merkel

          Sorry for the radio silence--my computer wouldn't charge yesterday in these hospital outlets, but it looks good now.            The past day has been pretty low key. Mom has been eating most of her meals (unless it looks gross). We took a few walks around the floor and down to "the healing lounge," which is the large family waiting area that has a lot of plants and trees. Also a lot of TV watching, although that has been hard given she doesn't have her glasses on. I think we will break the side off of an old pair of glasses when we get home.            In terms of the surgical site, it's healing nicely. I don't think I accurately described it in the previous post, but she does indeed have a "skin flap." It's just from the side of her face rather than her arm. But it's nice and pink. There are about 60-70 stitches (Dad stopped counting at 70 stitches) so the scar should look pretty good. On...

          Quick update -- because we just got an update from her doctor. At about 1:30 the information desk found us and they said they were closing her up. Dad and I stared at each other and said "ummmmm....no?" We figured that they meant the lead surgeon was starting the reconstruction and graft.            But...they went in, and everything actually looked pretty clean. They took 2cm in every direction from the tumor site. After inspecting the site for where it could have possibly drained, it actually looked like it didn't really drain anywhere. Because of this, there didn't seem to be a reason to take any lymph nodes (and there weren't any sentinel lymph nodes identified in the test earlier).            And because everything looked pretty clean, that was all the tissue they took: no skin flap and no skin graft. She will have a wave-like scar on her face (they pulled skin from her ear over), but...

Good morning,           It's been a very early day for all of us and everyone is running on very little sleep.            We arrived at the hospital at 5am and checked in to pre-OP. Over the course of the morning we met with all of the nurses and doctors who would be in the OR (at least most of them). She also spent 2 hours doing the sentinel lymph node testing. The point of this test is to follow injected radioactive dye and see what lymph node lights up first. But after waiting for 2 hours none of them lit up. Her doctor said this isn't unusual when you have already had a procedure done in the area, and he is going to go ahead and remove part (or all) of the parotid gland and see if there are any cancer cells there, as he suspects that's where it would have moved to if it has spread. The parotid gland is one of the salivary glands we have in our head and neck ( You can click here to see where the gland is. It goes to a wikiped...

Thank you all for checking out the blog. I’m Kim’s daughter, Katie. We figured this would be the easiest way to reach everyone at once to disclose information and hopefully answer any questions you may have. I should mention that I have a Ph.D. in cellular and structural biology and I’ve been researching cancer and aging for the better part of the past decade, so hopefully I can be as accurate as possible in answering questions as well. I’m going to try and update this regularly, especially over the next few weeks. How this all started (a little bit of background): Kim noticed a bump on her upper left cheek, on the ridge of her cheekbone, sometime in late June (we think – it’s hard to remember exactly when she noticed – it may have even been July). It was pretty deep, relatively small, and kindof squishy. We laughed about getting on an episode of Dr. Pimple Popper to have it removed. She visited her dermatologist in early August, who said it was just a cyst and to ...