Another One Bites the Dust

I had chemo today -- Taxol and Avastin = 4 hours of good ole fun with my chemo nurses. Nothing exciting happened. I will go in for my Neulasta white blood cell booster shot tomorrow. . . .

Devlin and I exchanged thoughts about Turkey day and that was about it. Not even a RX refill. Guess that's a good sign.

It's about 30 degrees outside and we had some very light snow flurries yesterday. Winter weather is here and Cyan is loving it. She, of course by being a husky, is more frisky on her walks and wants to go out ever 90 minutes or so.

Some pictures.

Cyan in her "chicken" pose.









Finnegan, Cyan's best friend, and Cyan panting after a hour of wrestling.








Me in my "F*CK CANCER" t-shirt and one of my sewing projects.

Another Drum Roll Please . . . . . . . .

Family and Friends, I got the results from my latest scans.

The CT scan of my torso showed two vast improvements. In March they measured out two large tumors covering about a third of my liver. The largest was 7 x 3 cm and the other was 6 x 4 cm. As of last week, the larger one is now a 1 cm cube and the other was not detectable. The CT also showed that my bones and spine are filling in the spots where the cancer ate away at the bone. Bone cancers take a long time to heal, so this is a good first step.

The MRI of both breasts showed only one 3cm mass in the left breast. Everything else looks stable.

Today I got the results of the MRI of the brain. I had a mass in the soft tissue behind my right eye that throughout the last 8 month of treatment remained the same. We had been discussing starting radiation in the new year if there was no progress. Yesterday, Dr. Devlin got the reading from the radiologist. S/He did not see anything. Devlin called them back and asked them to review the images because of my history. After an additional 3 hours of looking, they saw the remnants of cancer (a cancer footprint) in the exact location. By all means, this is good news too.

Lots of folks have been asking about surgery. Essentially, the most popular protocol, especially mets, is to treat with chemo/radiation and then after you shrink or zap it the most you can, you remove the rest. So for me, this means lots and lots of chemo.

Off the Net

I'm taking my week off literally and trying to keep the "c" word out of my daily thoughts and activities. I couldn't run that far away from it all this week as I had to schedule my CT for last Wednesday and I have a breast MRI tomorrow. I don't know the results from the CT (which doesn't bother me) and regardless of what they say, I'll start round 9 of chemo on Wednesday. At least the office will be full of leftover Halloween candy.

I'm going to test out a new therapist on Wednesday so we'll see how things go on that note.
In other news, the Phillies big World Series win has been the main activity for the week. We watched all of the games, and parts of games, and got roped into Phillies Phever!

I'm continuing with my sewing classes and working on some beginner projects in each of my three classes.

Halloween was quiet. We got about 20 trick-or-treaters and went to a birthday party for one of our neighbor's kids.

Barak's brother Amit is in town from France (he's in the US for business) so we are entertaining him for the weekend.

Fall is officially here in suburban Philadelphia. The leaves are starting to turn all sorts of fabulous colors and the temperature lingers in the low 50s and high 40s during the day. I'm glad that my hair started growing back because it's quite chilly!

That's about it. I'll let you all know what we find out/discuss with Devlin later this week.