Today we met with doctor Basu. She was great. She explained how they do things here and what the general order of things are going forward. It all depends on how surgery goes to start with. Once he has recovered from surgery enough, they will give him the 6th round of chemo. Once that is done, if all the drains and tubes have been removed we can go home for a couple weeks. This would be the weekend of Thanksgiving if his recovery goes well. Then around the week before Christmas we would come back for a full set of scans to evaluate how effective the chemo has been on the other cancer in his body. If it is no longer visible on the scans and tests then we move on to antibody therapy and radiation. If there is still visible cancer then we would make a plan depending on how bad it looks. There are many different paths this could take, but well pray this isnt the course we need to take. Assuming he gets the scans done the week before christmas, we would start a pre anitbody med the week of christmas and start the antibody the following week. This would be 5 days of an outpatient treatment. He would arrive at their clinic in the morning, get premeds to help with the side effects of the anitbody treatment then get an hour of antibody followed by a 20-30 minute flush of fluids. They say the pain usually get to the peak around the flush. It supposeldy last for 10-20 minutes and then fades. We would stay in the clinic for a few hours following this to be sure he has stablized. They would then let us go back to our hotel. This goes for 5 days. Then we would start radiaiton the following week. He would get 2 radiation treatments a day for 7 days. However they dont work on the weekends so we would finish up the following week. Besides the side effect of the radiaiton, he will also need to be knocked out each time (twice a day). They say this can be hard on them as well. Following this he would have one week off from all treatments. After that he would do another 5 days of antibodies and then could go home to arizona. Then for the next two antibody treatments (3&4) he would come back to new york once a month. Following these two treatment and until his body rejected the antibody(hopefully not until the limit of 2 years from the start of the first treatment) he would only have to come back once every two months. Scans to be sure he stayed NED(no evidence of disease) would happen along the way. We were amazed how much of this will be done outpatient(virtually all of it after surgery). We also learned that we can expect the same statistical results from this treatment here as we would at home with PCH. We are thankful for PCH and all they have done so far but we are also very thankful for Sloan Kettering and having an option. No matter what, we need God to show up to take the 40-50% chances up to 100%. We continually pray for that and appreciate everyones prayers too. We plan to make the final decision after we hear the results of surgery and the surgeons opinion of how things looked inside, however we are strongly leaning toward finishing treatment here in NY.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 03:39:18 +0000
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