still taking it in....

i thought i would post an update on the situation with mark. many people keep asking how, when & why...all the normal questions to ask in this crazy situation. so here is my best attempt to catch you up on the last 1-2 months :) please keep in mind i am exhausted in every aspect, but will do my best !

about 2 months ago mark started having some joint pain. he said his hips hurt then the next day he said his knees...then i was his shoulder....etc . each day his kept popping motrin to control this pain that was slowly moving through all his joints. he also started noticing some fatigue symptoms. he was just so tired all the time. we attributed all these symptoms to a virus and thought we would just have to give it time. well about a month ago he started running low grade fevers at night and having night sweats. there were a couple times that were so bad i thought i would just have to throw away all of our bedding. at this point i told mark he need to go in. with the fatigue, joint pain, night sweat, weight loss, and dry cough that we needed to figure it out. he headed into our primary care doc office. there they ran some blood tests and again said it was probably just a virus that needed some more time to go away. mark would have good days and bad days... it seemed to be random, but the more he slept and kept hydrated the better he felt.

finally on friday we got the results from the labs. everything came back normal except a little of inflammation on his arthritis panel. we were told to see them back again in a month to recheck how he was and do recheck labs.

on friday afternoon, mark said he had been coughing up some stuff and thought maybe he had a sinus infection or something. we talked about how we would see how he felt this weekend and maybe have him go back to the doctor on monday for some antibiotics. we are supposed to leave may 6th for riviera maya for our anniversary. and we wanted to make sure he was feeling good leaving for the trip.

well on sunday mark and i were working in the yard and mark got extremely fatigued, short of breath, and pale. i urged him to go the urgent care and to just figure out what is going on. he did( very surprising to me) and the doctor there thought it also was most likely a virus and maybe some allergies. right before mark was going to leave the doctor said if mark wanted they could run a chest xray to make sure everything was good. well about 20 min later the doctor came back with a shocked look on his face. he then told mark that he had some spots in his lungs and that he was concerned about what this was. he encouraged us to go to he er and to have a cat scan to get a further diagnosis of what we were looking at. so we headed in and had the cat scan done. we both felt like this was just another silly waste of time and were just waiting to hear that they made a mistake....well instead we got some more doctors in that said they were sorry and to say but it looked like mark has either

sarcoid disease

or

lymphoma....

nice huh......that was about the moment i felt my heart in my stomach and i was trying to pinch myself to wake up from a very bad dream.

we were admitted to the hospital they said for further testing to figure out for sure what is causing this. so today was another cat scan of his abdomen, and more talking with doctors. we have an AMAZING oncologist who feels VERY confident that if this is lymphoma, that mark has a very HIGH CURE RATE!!!! such great news.

so as of now we are going to have some more testing done tomorrow to hopefully get some biopsy's of theses "things" in his lungs and also some of the lymph nodes that are inflamed.

marks bday is tomorrow and the poor guy cannot even eat or drink before the procedure.

right now we are just trying to take it one step at a time. there have been MANY tears shed, bur currently we are feeling strong to fight whatever comes our way!

i love him so much i will fight with EVERYTHING i have to beat whatever is attacking him!

i will continue to update this and my facebook until we have a clear diagnosis for mark.

thank you all for your prayers and thoughts ! we need them!