Some Encouraging News

Excerpts taken from the final radiology reports of last week's scans:

Chest CT: Stable left upper lobe nodule, consistent with known treated metastatic disease. Other small peripheral branching nodules are no longer seen, and may represent treated metastasis.

Cervical Spine MRI: There are minimal changes compared to prior study.

Lumbar Spine / Sacrum MRI: Redemonstrated is a pathologic compression fracture of the L5 vertebral body with epidural soft tissue tumor extension that is still present, but decreased in size when compared to the prior examination. No new pathologic fracture is identified in the lumbar spine or sacrum. No new metastatic lesions are identified within the lumbar spine.

Left Lower Leg MRI: The mass demonstrates decreased size compared to prior study, now measuring 13.1 cm compared to 14.7 cm in longitudinal dimension, and 5.6 cm compared to 7 cm in axial dimension.

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The nature of the quantitative data from the left lower leg MRI allowed me to crunch some numbers:

• Longitudinally there was an 11% decrease in length.
• Axially there was a 20% decrease in diameter.
• If we put these two dimensions together and assume a cylindrical shape (πR² x H), then we can calculate a 43% decrease in the primary tumor volume!!!

This last value was so high that I had to go back to my engineering books and make sure my percent decrease formula was correct!

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The oncologist we saw today was extremely pleased with the results telling us that he had never seen such a positive response after only two rounds of Yondelis. We'll take it!

And I started my treatment today! My liver functions were the lowest they've been since I started this new clinical trial, dropping into the double digits :)