Chemotherapy Again

My apologies for taking so long to update the blog today. It has been a long day and I am just getting a chance to sit down at my computer. This morning we met with Dr. Becdach again and he confirmed that all three doctors agree that chemotherapy is the way to go at this moment. Apparently, Dr. Spencer told him, based on the photographs and PET scan, she would not be able to do any more radiation at this time. So, as they all said last week, we are going to try to shrink the existing cancer and slow down any new growth with the chemo and then re-evaluate the situation after two rounds. (That will be one week on the pump, two weeks off, then one week on followed by two weeks off in addition to the Monday infusions of Erbitux) Needless to say, nobody around here had an exciting day at all. While we are so glad that the PET scan did not show the cancer to be spreading in to any other organs, we are just saddened for Dad to have to go through all of this....especially the chemo! He is feeling pretty rough trying to manage the extreme pain in his jaw area caused by the bad teeth and the tumor area. Now to add the side effects of chemo is just a bummer. He is tough and will get through it. Please pray now for all of this. The MRI came back and still showed that suspicious "spot" on the neck vertebrae area and also a SMALL spot further down on the back. Again, there is no concrete evidence that this is cancer, just suspicious. Not sure what the verdict will be about going after those. Still many questions to be answered. If Dr. Spencer thinks they are worthy of being treated, it is possible they may do radiation on them just to be sure and this can be done while on chemotherapy. It would be extremely rare for these spots to be caused by the same squamous cell carcinoma causing all the trouble in the left neck, as the cells would have had to travel through the entire lymphatic system through the body and then back up to the neck and spine area to set up camp. It seems that the other major organs wouldn't have been left out of that trip and so far they are clean, so we will pray hard about that and look forward to finding out that it is nothing to worry about.

Dad feels really strongly that the teeth are causing him great pain although the doctors say that it is caused from both the teeth AND the tumor around the jaw bone, etc. He told Dr. Bechdach that he KNOWS without a shadow of a doubt that certain pain is caused by the tooth. He knows his body so Dr. Bechach said if he wanted to have the teeth taken out to go ahead and do so. It does come with some risks and also causes him to have to come off the Zometo, a chemo type drug that helps stop cancer in the bone and the spread of cancer in the bone if that is what those spots turned out to be. Decisions, decisions. We have a call in to Dr. Holmes to give us his opinion and help us to decide what to do there. Again, through prayer, we will know what to do.

Join me as we give it all to God. He will take care of this whole situation. Pray for tolerable side effects from the chemo, clear decisions to be made, the tooth pain, healing...EVERYTHING!

Take care and love on mom and dad!
Thanks from the bottom of my heart,
Michelle