Friends of mine set up a photo session for our family. It was gifted to me in September but with Steve having surgery in October, we never got around to doing it. Now that he’s in his last days, we knew we had to make it happen. The photographer was kind enough to come to our house and work with us in taking some pictures.
I dressed us all in blue for colon cancer. And I love the results. We will treasure these photos forever!
On June 18th, we saw the Oncologist and he told us the bone scan was clean and there is no cancer in his bones. First good news we had received! I thought for sure it would be so I was pretty happy to hear that. The plan was to start chemo on Wednesday, June 25, 2014 and the doctor planned for the first scans to be done probably in September to see it’s working. They will be doing blood work weekly or biweekly to make sure the chemo isn’t affecting his white/red blood cells and platelets. If it does, the doctor will readjust. Really hoping we can put this in remission for a long time. Only time will tell.
Today we saw the Oncologist again with an update on Steve’s CEA Number. And we got some really good news! Steve’s CEA (tumor marker number) is down to 64!!! On June 4th it was 536. Then a few weeks later it was up to 834.8. Four weeks ago it was down to 263.1. And today it’s 64!!! The doctor said not all cancers can measure the tumors with this marker, but Colon Cancer is one of them so this does tell us that the tumors are shrinking. But we can tell as well because of some little differences that we see that I’ve mentioned before. (His dry cough is gone and his night sweats are gone for the most part and his bowels are better. …
I knew it had been a while since I updated this site, but I didn’t realize it had been 6 months! The reason I haven’t updated in the past 6 months is there hasn’t really been a significant change….. which isn’t a bad thing when you are stage 4! This past week, Steve had his last follow up for the year so I thought it was a good time to share how he’s doing. His CEA number is holding at 11, which is low and good. He had a bone scan earlier this month because he was having some back pain and his last scan still showed a spot on his vertebrae. I won’t lie, this scared me. I was more worried than Steve was. …
We spent the weekend at my parents while Steve was traveling and before we left I wanted to leave some cute pictures of the girls on my mother’s camera. They were so silly. The camera settings were off at first so some of them are blurry but they were too cute to not post. Allison was being silly closing her eyes. Holly thinks she’s a model, always striking a pose. Allison isn’t quite sure what to do. She figured it out. lol