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…

Today is Steve’s 17th chemo treatment.  It’s been a while since I’ve updated and I’m sorry about that.  Steve’s been bugging me to post an update but I’ve been busy shoveling snow, ice, snow again, then more snow and then even more snow, then I got up this morning and shovel MORE snow!!! You get the picture. I want to apologize because this snow is all my fault.  I think that mother nature is trying to see how far she can push me before I go over the edge.  I’m sorry to take you all on the ride with me.  Hopefully she’s satisfied and will stop. So how is Steve doing?  Steve started a new chemo to replace the Oxaliplatin.  For those of you that…

Steve saw his Oncologist today and his CEA is still going up, slowly but it’s going up.  Today it was 20.  In March it was 17 and in February it was 12.  So it’s moving up but that’s not the direction the doctor wants to see it go.  That means the cancer is also growing.  So it’s time to change chemo treatments. We are going on another family trip this month, this time out to California to Disneyland!!  The girls are VERY excited.  The doctor is going to wait until after our trip to change his chemo.  Tomorrow will be his last one on this type of chemo and then he’ll take a break so he’ll feel great on our trip. It’ll actually be a…

Today began round 6 of chemo.   It was the fastest and smoothest one yet.  We had one of our favorite nurses Erin (she was actually our first so that maybe why we like her so much).  The port worked great and Erin got the IV in right away with a perfect blood return!  So we were off to a great start. Steve feels good today, his appetite is up and he’s just in a good mood.  He’s been unhappy the past week due to another sore on his tongue.  When he gets these sores he can’t eat much or even drink much.  So think about it, would you be miserable?  I know I would!!  So it was a tough week but yesterday he started feeling…

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 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…