Wednesday, January 18, 2012

So Now My Dad is leaving:(

So this is the third family member that has left since October, and I have not been able to wrestle their passports away. I am going to blame the chemo.

Dad leaves tomorrow early and we will all miss him.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Round one of High Dose Chemo Over

Jan 5th: Thursday day 1 - Monday day 5 (round 1 of 24). Oral, taken each night at bed.

I was prepared this time:
Drugs for nausea and constipation, kept up my exercise etc. Riding my special Charlie.

I am sure that the awesome MRI news helped too.

Avastin continues every two weeks. IV infusion at Barrow, takes about 40 mins. I just kick back and read a book.

Next round of chemo starts Feb. 1st. There will be 24 in total, one each month. (5 days out of each month)

Unless anything changes I wont bug you with the monthly chemo report:)

Oh, the speech therapy lady is mean, making me work harder each time. She adds percentages to my progress in each area and expects me to beat my score each time. If I don't she adds cryptic little notes to my file.

I will tell you about the fabulous Horse Clinic at the barn coming up when it happens. So excited!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Good News After First Post-Surgery MRI

Today was my first MRI post surgery / radiation / chemo. They delay the first one by about 4 weeks to avoid swelling etc. being mistaken for tumor growth. We chose to wait until after the holidays.

I had a couple of sleepless nights and waking up feeling sick with worry. This was in spite of trying to let go of things that I cannot change.

As the doc loaded the MRI images ( I thought that she would have already read it before we went in ) she reminded me that we were just looking for "no growth today".

What we actually saw was a comparison between a tumor the size of a chicken egg on the pre-surgery MRI and one the size of a marble taken this morning. The Dr. herself said this was a major surprise and extremely good news. She must have thought that I was crazy when I kept on asking the same question over and over "So this is good news then?"

I know that this is something that will never go away, I will be fighting this for the rest of my life. But tonight I am savouring a victory

Yippeee!!

Tonight I start 2 years of 5/23 Temodar at 250mg combined with Avastin for as long as possible. I will have an MRI every 2 months, or more often if things don't feel right.

On a lighter note, I have graduated from OT. They clearly thought that the Astereognosis issue was about as important as I do. ST will still continue.

A big thank you to all my family and friends helping me along this journey. I could not do it without you.