Hi Mary, Just got your reply posting to my first response. Glad to hear from you. I printed your response and Sun is reading it right now. We have 4 granddaughters aged 2-7. Three of them live 2.5 hrs away, about a 15 minute drive from Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. They spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with us. The other lives in Monterrey, CA. She and our other daughter were here the week before Christmas. Sun turns 54 next Thursday. I am 55. We celebrated our 34th anniversary on Thursday, the 27th of Dec. She works at the Patrick AFB Child Development Center. I work for NASA at Kennedy Space Center. I have a very liberal workday, and have taken quite a bit of time off for her hospitalization and recovery. For the first several weeks, I was home continually, then gradually went back for part days. I would go in at 4:30 in the morning and be home by 9:00 to spend the day with her. That seemed to work quite well. I'll probably do something similar when she starts chemo/radiation. I just responded to another cancer patient who has not yet had his Whipple. It is scheduled for next week. All he said is his tumor is outside the head of his pancreas, but he didn't specifically say it was ampullary. He may not even know at this point. You may want to check his posting and add to my response as you and Sun appear to be at opposing ends of the Whipple procedure spectrum. Yours seems to have been fairly mild while hers was not, and she has still not recovered even though hers was almost 3 weeks before yours. Hope to keep in touch, even though this message board deletes our email addresses so we cannot correspond directly. George & Sun.