I want to give you a quick update on my visit to Mayo last week, and
follow-up with my local cancer doc this week. I hardly recognized the place and could barely find my way around without all of the snow and ice. I am usually there in the winter.
It was a hard and fast trip - only
40 hours from the time I left the house in Bedford, flew to Minneapolis, drove
to Rochester, spent the night there and then 10 hours at the Mayo Clinic, drove
back to Minneapolis, flew back to DFW, and then arrived back home (thanks loads
to Carol for trips to and from the airport). Salient items learned:
- It is time to restart chemotherapy. The cancer has increased from 1.0 to 2.0 in the two months since I discontinued chemo. My doc at Mayo is the head of the hematology department there, and she spent a lot of time discussing various chemo options. I met with my local cancer doc yesterday to decide which treatment option to take. He asked what I wanted to do, I told him, and he agreed and ordered the prescription. I will go back on to strong doses of my previous cancer med daily, with a good helping of steroids on the side.
- The cancer has morphed from the easy-going, laid back cancer of years past into a more aggressive form of its prior self. I will likely need to remain on some form of chemo for the rest of my life, instead of the lengthy breaks I have enjoyed over the past years. I thank the Great Sustainer of the Universe, however, that there are medicines to combat this. I am grateful for the two months I have had off, and grateful for the meds to fight it.
- The skeletal frame is still intact. Other than the bone that the tumor ate away last year, ten years now and the disease has not attacked the frame. It has a tendency to create micro lesions through the bone but has not done so.
- The tumor does not appear to be re-forming. Pain that I have been experiencing that led me to believe the tumor might be coming back is from a series of parallel fractures (called insufficiency fractures) in the tailbone area that is growing back after the tumor destroyed it last year. These should be healed up and all better in 2-3 months.
- While there are a number of medicines available to me now, a very promising possibility a few (maybe 3) years down the road is Car-T cells. It is a medicine that acts like a transplant and may be able to take me off chemo. It has shown incredible success in trials. There is a trial coming up this fall, but I am too healthy to be admitted into it (a good problem).
Thanks to all for the love, encouragement, prayers and support.
