Brody had a CT done yesterday which was his first since about 3 weeks after his surgery. I for one was worried going into this one-- Brody has been feeling pretty good lately and that is normally when you get the rug pulled out from under you.
To review a bit-- Brody had surgery in March to "debulk" his tumor-- the hope being that the chemo would work better on a smaller tumor and also so the tumor wouldn't be pressing so much on his other organs and causing issues (like obstructing urine flow from his kidney to his bladder, obstructing his bowels, etc)-- the Surgeon removed about 95% of the tumor-- the remaining parts were too "involved" meaning the posed more risk to remove then benefit from removing-- the surgeon didn't want to "hurt" Brody. We were optimistic about how his chemo has been working since most of the tumor removed was dead tissue-- part of this could have been from the chemo but also from when Brody was first diagnosed as having relapsed the tumor was growing rapidly and when this happens it can grow so fast as to cut off it's own blood supply.
Anyway-- since after his surgery, the tumor involvement remaining is all "live" tumor-- I for one was worried about the tumor regrouping-- apparently the chemo is still working to keep the tumor in check. Brody's oncologist said that the tumor looks to be "about the same and maybe a little smaller"-- since what is remaining is so oddly shaped, I imagine it is hard to tell if it is smaller or not-- but in 2 1/2 months it has not grown which is good news to us.
Yesterday (Friday) was Brody's normally off week (no chemo-- just labs)-- His ANC (Absolute Neutrophil Count) was pretty low (which is weird because his has been real good under this chemo)... it was low enough that Brody's oncologist wants him to stop his oral chemo (what he takes at home each day) til next week. The reason being if his ANC is not high enough by next Friday, his next round of IV chemo could be delayed.
Anyway-- that is pretty much all that is going on with us. The boys have 2 more days of school (Mon & Tue next week).... we will be doing a very light summer school with the boys-- we will be doing some reading and math 2 or 3 times per week-- We always want the boys to read (not a problem with Geordi who reads alot), but for math we need to cover some of the more obscure standards that we didn't cover in our home school curriculum.
Thats pretty much it for us....
More late....
Bill
