Back Surgery is Scheduled for Today

On June 17, 2014  Steve had his first Colonoscopy.   Thankfully the prep for it wasn’t too bad on him.  The doctor wasn’t expecting to find the tumor because he looked at all the scans beforehand and even he saw nothing in the colon.  So he was pretty curious as to what he’d see.  And so were we.  I was actually wondering if there might not even be a tumor and this would be a rare type of colon cancer.   My husband would be the one to not have something easily found.   Because he likes to be ‘different’. Well, that wasn’t the case.  The doctor did find the tumor and it’s big.  The mass is in the sigmoid colon.  He said it’s pretty much the entire…

We received the results of the CT Scan today.  The doctor says that after looking at the ct scan himself, there has been a small reduction in the tumors.  It’s not as big as the last time but he feels they are all slightly smaller.  He did point out that they are measuring them in mm and not cm so we are looking at something very small in size. Tomorrow is Steve’s first treatment in the next chemo regimen and it will be less the Oxaliplatin.  The doctor is going to monitor his CEA number closely and if he sees any change then he’ll likely change up his entire chemo prescription and use some different drugs. At this point the doctor is looking at it…

Steve had his 8th round of chemo this week and he’s pretty happy it’s over because he has a break and won’t be back to the infusion center for 4 weeks. Why the break?  He needed it for so many reasons and without it, going forward would have been way too hard. First of all, his CEA number is down to 11.  So that’s GREAT!  So if he’s going to take a break, now is a good time to do it since the number is still going down and the chemo is still working. But the real reason for the break is because he needs it physically and mentally.  Even with the reduction in the 5-FU, he’s still getting the mouth sores, but not as…

A week ago Wednesday, Steve’s doctor ordered an MRI to get a better look at his spine and the tumors to see if Radiation would be good or not.  When the radiologist read the MRI he contacted Steve’s doctor and suggested that Steve go to the hospital immediately to have the spine doctors look at the MRI.  The concern was that the tumors were too close to his spinal cord and they were afraid of paralysis. So at 10pm last Wednesday night, Steve and I headed to Rhode Island hospital where they gave him a steroid to relieve some of the swelling around the spinal cord to avoid the compression.  The spine doctors then looked at the MRI and decided that with the steroid, there…

We saw our 2nd opinion doctor today who is the best in RI and came HIGHLY recommended by many.  He agreed with our current Oncologist and thinks this chemo regimen is really the best way to start.  And then see what happens in 2-3 months when they do the first scan.  At that point he said if it isn’t working, we should think about something else.  He’d be more than happy to talk with us then but sees no reason to do anything else right now. Knowing he feels the same way makes us even more confident that this is the best thing for Steve.  And we really like our current Oncologist so we’ll be staying with him.  However, our 2nd opinion doctor also said…

It’s been about a month since I updated and I realize some of you are thinking something is up since I haven’t updated. I’m here to tell you NO, nothing is “UP”… all is good. Steve took a cycle off from Chemo and ultimately had a month break. It was a nice break and Steve bounced back amazingly and we took full advantage of it. We went to Disney with the girls! We surprised them with a trip. It was a trip we all needed. You see, we love going to Disney as a family. We go every other year and it’s the biggest thing we do. And the girls love it. We all love it actually. It’s our “family thing” to do that we…