Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting. About 3 months ago my dad started losing weight. He noticed he was having trouble with swallowing and sometimes food seemed to come up. At first he was put on Prilosec because it seemed like reflux type symptoms. He continued to lose a significant amount of weight and an endoscopy was done. Initially the findings were that there was some kind of a mass in the stomach but results were BENIGN. My dad continued to lose weight going from 223lbs to 160lbs with only eating bites of oatmeal. We knew something was very wrong. We were able to get my dad directly into HCMC to be admitted with another endoscopy scheduled there. He could barely walk into the hospital. They confirmed the mass in the lower part of the stomach and did another biopsy in different areas. They also gave him a Nasogastric feeding tube bypassing the mass because he desperately needed nutrition. Today it confirmed our fear that it is indeed CANCER. We still have some unanswered questions about where we go from here. Tomorrow he is scheduled to place a J-tube which is a feeding tube into the lower abdomen called jejunum. He currently is bothered by the NG tube and this will make him more comfortable. He will also have a mini camera go inside his stomach and get different pictures of what's going on in there. There is also talk of a PET scan to see if the cancer has spread to different areas. He will most likely have to do chemotherapy to start to try to shrink the tumor. It's nice that we have family in the cities and has had that support so far. We were able to get Sally to the cities with the help of the Grace Life church family. Thoughts and Prayers are greatly appreciated. Read More of the journal titled "December 26, 2019" (
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/stevebuck/journal/view/id/5e05518dbfb94c9143cd825b)
