Mad Skills...




Here is Miss J, in all her wobbly glory, stepping around the living room. Hopefully we can finally give those dirty knees a rest and start getting some use out of our adorable shoes. Note to self...stop buying baby shoes, really, just stop, enough already.

In other news, I made it through chemo round #4. We added a new drug this time, Avastin, which is one of the newer monoclonal antibodies which is supposed to target the cancer cells and turn off their ability to build new blood supplies. The side effects aren't too bad, my blood pressure is up a little. I did have a reaction to the oxaliplatin this time, just a little itching, but they jacked me up with benadryl and steroids. I don't know what it means yet in terms of my ability to continue taking the drug. I'm hoping we can stick with it a little longer at least.

We met with a surgeon last Monday and came up with a new plan. We're going to do 2 more rounds of chemo and then switch over to chemo/radiation. The chemo will be weekly infusions and daily pills. The radiation will be 5 days/week for 5 weeks. Then I'll get a 4-week break before they'll do surgery to remove the peritoneal implant. Then another 6-weeks recovery before we start back up with the chemo infusions every two weeks for another 6 cycles.

Then we see what happens...the surgeon wasn't overly optimistic...said that in cases like this they rarely see surgery as curative. He said the peritoneal implant won't kill me, but it's an indication of the spread of disease and that's the problem. So we'll do chemo for a while first to try to knock back the microscopic disease and then go after the tumor. He talked us out of pursuing the hot chemo surgery (HIPEC) for now. He said with just a single known implant instead of widespread peritoneal disease, the mortality rate from the HIPEC surgery itself isn't worth the risk.

So I'm excited to have a plan. Chemo, chemo/radiation, surgery, recovery, chemo...then a break. So maybe in November and December we can have some nice time with no treatments. I'm feeling a little worn these days with the cumulative effects of the chemo and working and everything else. But really, more good days than bad.