Hi Evelyn and Willy,
You've already gotten a lot of great suggestions as to preparation for surgery.
I have a few to add:
Detoxification is important. From the minute cancer begins, it starts putting toxins, dead cell parts, and chemical pollutants into our body. Quite often those toxins just continue to sit there, making us sicker and sicker. When we have surgery, anesthesia adds to those toxins. Then we have chemo, and or radiation, and the toxin load just gets that much heavier. Therefore it's important to start detoxification BEFORE surgery and chemo, and to continue detoxifying while getting treatment.
The best way to detoxify is to drink water - lots and lots of pure water. As much as you can stand, or as much as you are medically allowed to have. (80 - 100 ounces a day is optimal, but realisitically you may not be able to drink that much.) Other beverages can be counted in that 80 - 100 ounces per day, but at least half of it should be just pure water. (Green tea is an excellent choice - but you need to check with the dr first since you are on a blood thinner, as tea will potentiate - strengthen - the blood-thinner's action.)
Also use pure water for cooking. TAP WATER IS NOT THE CANCER PATIENT'S FRIEND, and home-filtration systems while better than nothing, do not always do the job you will need them to do. The very best water for detoxification and treatment of cancer is either steam-distilled water, or very highly filtered water that has then been re-oxygenated e.g. PENTA water - which unfortunately is hard to find and quite expensive. ( Re-oxygenated steam-distilled water would be the very best, but those kinds of systems are very expensive, and working with food-grade peroxide to re-oxygenate water is a pretty labor intensive process as the peroxide has to be handled very carefully. If you can find an easy and inexpensive method online for re-oxygenating the water, it might be worth looking at - if not, I wouldn't worry about it.)
Supermarkets and drug stores both sell bottled steam-distilled water by the gallon, usually much cheaper than other bottled waters. Home steam distillers are available thru the internet, but you would not receive it before the surgery, so I recommend if you want to go that route, you start getting bottled steam-distilled water from the store now, and if cost is not an issue, go ahead and order a home distiller for use later. It is a very worthy investment - once you start experiencing the purity of drinking and cooking with steam-distilled, I doubt you will ever want to go back to tap or other filtered or bottled water.
You can also detoxify by eating as much as you can of raw fruits and vegetables. Many people who advocate alternative and/or complementary therapies say you MUST avoid simple sugars, therefore minimizing intake of all fruit, but that is not strictly true. Fruits that are high in citric acid are actually very beneficial, not just for their nutrient, anti-oxidant and laxative properties, but because the fructose they contain is in itself a powerful cancer fighting tool. fruits high in citric acid, especially papaya and pineapple, also contain enzymes that are crucial for getting natural cancer killers past the cell membrane and into the cancer cell.
One caveat to fruits and vegetables - you need to check with your dr as to how much fruits and cruciferous veggies you should be eating, because too much fruit can prolong bleeding times and make a blood thinner TOO effective, whereas too many leafy greens can provide too much vitamin K, which will interfere with the blood thinner. (In that respect they might balance each other out - but still best to ask the doc.)
whole grains and legumes (organic if possible) can also help with detoxification, as well as with the 2nd thing I would recommend before surgery: bowel preparation. You should find out from the surgeon's office if they will have you do a specific preparation to get your bowels emptied out before surgery. If so, increasing your intake of whole grains and legumes, as much as you are able now, will help get that process started. Increasing fluid intake for detoxification also aids bowel preparation. If the surgeon is not going to have you do a bowel preparation beforehand, I would still recommend increasing fiber on your own, unless the dr gives you a very specific reason not to. Anesthesia stops the normal motion of the bowel, pain medications are constipating, and it sounds like nutrition and fluids are going to be a challenge for you post-operatively, so you need your bowel to be functioning as well as it can before you go into surgery. (Again, I recommend you check with your dr for any reasons you shouldn't be increasing fiber, fluids, etc, before surgery.)
Exercise before surgery helps with bowel preparation and oxygenation of tissues, therefore it is important to start doing something now. It doesn't have to be strenuous - chances are you don't feel up to doing that much right now, anyway. But it does need to be every day, at least for 10 minutes, if you can tolerate it. walking is great - it is something the too of you can do together and that will benefit both of you physically, as well as giving you time to spend together. Don't aim for distance and speed - aim for time. THe closer you can get to walking 30 - 45 minutes a day, the more benefit you will get.
If you can't walk, but have a set of stairs and can tolerate climbing them (doesn't have to be a marathon pace!) - climb the stairs for 10 minutes a day, or more if you can. Even standing still and lifting a book up and down with each hand can suffice for exercise that will help get you ready for surgery.
The added benefit of exercise, even in small amounts, is that it releases endorphings which will help you feel better physically, and give you a better over-all sense of well-being,
Breathing is very important. (Well, duh Tre - yeah!!) But I mean that seriously. Cancer doesn't like oxygen - the better oxygenated your cells are, the harder it will be for cancer to thrive. Start now at practicing deep breaths. Big deep breaths that use your diaphragm (make your abdomen pooch out as you inhale, and collapse as you exhale.) Breathe in thru your nose, as deep as you can, breathe out thru your mouth, exhaling as much as you can. Do this at least 3 - 4 times, as often as you can think to do it. When you've mastered that, add at least one big deep belly cough after the 3rd or 4th breath. This will help get your body better oxygenated, plus prepare you for the type of breathing and coughing you should do after surgery to prevent pneumonia.
Humor can be your best friend in the days, weeks, months to come. Try to find something to give you a big belly laugh EVERY DAY. (Even if it's the same thing every day - as long as it gets your belly jiggling, it's good! - for both of you!) And chuckle just as much thru-out the day as you can, both now, while in the hospital (very, very, very gentle belly laugh more appropriate at that point,) and once you come home. Laughter, a resilient sense of humor, is one of the absolute most effective healing agents, and a powerful weapon for kicking cancer in the butt. Therefore enlist friends, family, hospital staff - anyone you can in the quest for good humor.
And last but not least in my long list of recommendations, talk to each other. Doesn't have to be long, deep earth-moving conversations - just make sure to talk to each other, about what makes you happy, what makes you sad, what scares you, what encourages you - sharing with each other is to the good. Most of all, talk about what you need from each other, so that neither of you is left guessing as to how best help the other.
I hope these suggestions help. I will be keeping both of you in my thoughts, as will a lot of other people from Cancer Compass. Take care, let us know how things go, and please keep writing if you have questions or concerns, or just need someone to listen.
sincerely, Tre