Larry's taking over the blog-Anita's in surgery

They just wheeled Anita into surgery at 8AM, after 3 hours of prep and paperwork. The nurses and staff here have been excellent so far. Anita was amazingly calm this morning, she did not show any traces of nervousness. She will have 2 hours with Dr. Lisa Guerra, her breast surgeon. They will excise her breast and her "sentinel" lymph nodes. They injected a radioactive dye into her last night to see where her initial or sentinel lymph nodes are, and take them out. The sentinel nodes are the first nodes that would have cancer cells in them. They will quickly do a biopsy (during the surgery) of the sentinel nodes to see if any cancer cells are in there. If the sentinel nodes are clean, she gets to keep the rest of her lymph nodes. Breast surgery has progressed a lot in the last few years, it's a long way from the day where they immediately took out all of the lymph nodes and the chest muscle.   (Below is Anita with Dr. Guerra)

After Dr. Guerra is done, the hard work begins. About 10AM, Dr. Dickinson, the plastic surgeon, will start his end, which will be about 6-8 hours more. He will be transplanting tissue from the stomach area, and creating a new breast out of the tissue. It's all done microsurgically (lots of veins and arteries to be disconnected and reconnected), which is why it takes so long.

I will update when Dr. Guerra comes out of the OR.

And guess what? Her anesthesiologist is from Hawaii, is our age, and attended the same school Anita went to one summer (Punahou, where our Prez went to school)

Thanks for your support-talk to you in a few hours