Hotel de Guyer & Forward Planning

The last week was a crazy week for my visiting schedule. During the week of chemo both my mother and mother-in-law were in town, then my mom's two sisters came in town and today as the aunts left, my sister and two nieces arrived. And then tomorrow my dad comes in town. The picture above is of Autumn and I at the dog park with Jessica and Samantha.

My doctors constantly ask me how I feel to qualitatively gauge the progress of my treatment. What I've noticed is that I have a little more pain after my chemo treatments but afterwards I feel a bit better. It's difficult to say whether feeling better now is an improvement from feeling better before and I have a difficult time differentiating my aches verse pains (I really have no idea what that means).

My doctor's NP told me that a tumor can become inflamed and then shrink down again after a dose of chemotherapy. She continued, "I like to believe that it's the chemo working specifically with that tumor." I thought that was nice because my back has been hurting me lately so I guess it's working :)

Next week I have my re-staging scans on Sunday and Monday to quantitatively evaluate my treatments. The NP explained that they should be able to see the tumor dying from the inside out. We're hoping to see that the cancer has stopped spreading which will be great news or better yet that the tumors are shrinking.

If everything looks good then we'll keep steering the course and if doesn't then we'll cook up a new cocktail for next round. We still have a large arsenal of available treatments and are optimistic on killing this disease.