Fighting the Good Fight

wow, so my last post was pretty gloomy. But, as we all know, it usually gets worse before it can get better...

So Shannon got all lined up for her radiation treatments, and actually went through two of them. Before doing it, they sent her for a PET scan to examine lymph node involvement and get a baseline measurement for her tumor. Well, at her 2nd appointment, the radiation oncologist grabbed her into a side room. The lymph nodes were okay, but the scan turned up suspicious spots on Shannon's liver. The liver is generally the first place this cancer spreads to. While they can't tell for sure if it's cancer or not (suspicious spots can be cancer or any number of other conditions which cause sugars to burn quicker than normal), they thought the best course of treatment now is to stop radiation and instead attack this thing with a more broadband chemotherapy. That means no more chemo pills. This is full on, intravenous chemo.

Now, let's let me work out why this doesn't mean the end of the world. First of all, Dr. Hermann was quick to point out that he has several patients who had it spread to the liver who have gone past the 10 year mark still cancer free. Also, looking at wikipedia, when the cancer is isolated in the liver in small spots, you can do surgery to "resect" the liver and the prognosis for that is above 50% over 5 years, rather than the grim 5% that Stage 4 would usually quote you. And we still don't really know that it is cancer, it could be nothing.

So today was Day 1 of chemo. And we got our first snippet of good news today. Comparing the blood work from this morning to the blood work taken last week, Shannon's tumor marker has already dropped after just two treatments of radiation. So it looks like the cancer should be responding well to the treatments. Chemo treatments will be long...2 hour wait in the beginning while blood work confirms her cell counts, then 3-4 hours of infusion, followed by a 46 hour infusion pump. But the whole staff there? AMAZING! They constantly shower you with attention, ask you if you need things, explain everything, ask to see your kids, the whole deal! And they even made sure to get Shannon a day bed with a window today so she'd have a nice comfy treatment.

So that's that. This is going to be a long tough journey for Shannon, but everything in my head is telling me she can beat it. It will suck, but everyone at Hopkins has been awesome and made this experience a lot easier to go through.