Second Round of Chemo is Done!

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…

Our amazing community is hosting an evening of Yoga in honor of Steve this week.  I can’t even express in words what this means to our family.  Every week our friends amaze us with their love, support and generosity.   Calling ourselves Lucky doesn’t even describe what we feel.  LOVED is really more like it. Steve is a very proud man, so letting them do this for us has been very hard for him to accept.  But he’s realized that this is a way that all the people around us can help me, can take some sort of burden off of me.  It’s also a way for him to see how much love we have around us. I recently posted this on Facebook and I know…

Tomorrow will be Steve’s 12th Chemo treatment and his last one for this 6 month set.  We thought 6 months actually went till January but nope, it’s done tomorrow.  But that just means it’s time to change it up a bit. Currently Steve is receiving the FOLFOX cocktail of chemotherapy which consists of 5-FU, Leucovorin, and Oxaliplatin.  I am slowly learning about each of these drugs.  The 5-FU is the one that was causing the mouth sores and is also the one that he gets on a slow drip for the 48 hours at home.  You may recall that in October he reduced that one by 15% to hopefully stop the mouth sores – and it worked!  We’ve checked his CEA number once since the…

Yesterday  (7/21/14) Steve and I received some really good news about his Stage 4 Colon Cancer.  His CEA number, which is the tumor marker in his blood, was lower – a lot lower!  When he was in the hospital the first week of June it was 536.  Then a few weeks later it was up to 834.8.  Yesterday it was 263.1.   Needless to say we both cried when I gave him the good news. That means the chemo is working. We saw the doctor today and he was very happy as well with the results.   He said the drop in his CEA is great after only 2 treatments.  I asked him if he expects that number to go to zero at some point, if…

Today was Steve’s first day of chemo and it went well. We are getting chemo at the Infusion center at Kent Hospital and I have to say we really like them there.  Plus it’s nice and close to the house which is a huge plus. The doctor told us we’d be there for a couple of hours but when we arrived they told us that wasn’t true, we’d actually be there for about 5-6 hours.  Steve wasn’t very happy at first but it is what it is and nothing we can do about it.  Eventually we’ll be down to about 3 hours.  So perhaps that’s what he was thinking about. Since Steve had the port placed just 2 days ago, the area is still very…

I  forgot to mention in my previous post that the CT Scan also showed that the inflammation of his colon and the small perforation in the colon that they saw last time, is no longer visible.  So that means that part healed.  That made us VERY HAPPY because that means surgery is not in the future again… which is a good thing.  Surgery is not something we want because that means no chemo for at least 6 weeks after and perhaps even more.  Right now Chemo is what he needs. That was my Christmas Gift!