It's Thursday, Think Negative

Today is Thursday, so C heads back to City of Hope for the second of his "down week" infusions of vincristine.  It's one of the easier treatments since it doesn't lead to nausea, though it's no walk in the park.  He's started feeling a bit of the neuropathy that leads to numbness in the fingertips, and just a general wiped out feeling.

We're sorting out some of the treatment plans, and C is fully engaged in all that at this point.  The over-arching question is whether to move directly to surgery - which has the pros of satisfying a desire to literally cut this crap out and then reducing the amount of radiation that would be needed, and the cons being complex surgery and neurosurgery with some risky outcomes and possibly just delaying the chemo and radiation that might be the most effective.

Or, stick with chemo/radiation - which has the pros of being the initial course recommended by our friend Dr. M and also not exposing C to the unknowns of surgery, and the cons of higher dosages of radiation and the one study offered by Dr. C (covering only 14 people over the past 20 or 30 years) showed surgery to be part of better outcomes. Either road involves daily doses of irinotecan (for a week, beginning next Thursday). It's the next drug up, on deck, waiting to come in and hit this thing out of the park.

So we have less than a week to decide about that, and while C is there today he can maybe get a few more questions answered.

Mom came to visit last weekend.  It was important for her to see C, since she hadn't seen him since his diagnosis.  It was a low-key weekend.  At one point C just rested on the couch and Mom sat there, keeping her vigil, doing what Moms do when a child is not well.



We continue to get tagging photos from far and wide.  Thanks for these. Kevin sends this one from a construction site inspection. He said, "Each building has a sprinker system that is activated in case of fire. Sort of a building immune system. Can't wait until C's sprinkler system is fully functional again."

And Peter enlisted the help of a familiar source of strength and wisdom...




And Pete visited another source of power...



So that's where we are.  Keep C in your thoughts as he takes in this dose, and think of it doing it's job - killing off this parasite, this squatter, and leaving C for good, free and clear.

It's Thursday. It's Chemo Day. "Think Negative".