New Round of Treatments

The past two months have been pretty crazy.  I started school (I'm getting my Bachelor's in Accounting).  John and I were able to go to Fiji.  We got home from Fiji and had John's regularly scheduled scans to follow up on his cancer.  We found out that they were concerned about his spine and had an MRI done on his spine to get a better picture of what was going on.  The day after his MRI, we met with three of his doctors.  We got different feedback from all of them about their impressions from the scans. They ranged from super hopeful that there was no recurrence, to go fight this thing again. By the end of the day, we had a biopsy scheduled for his back and were told that the tumor board would discuss John's case and get everyone's input-at which point they would decide for sure whether or not to do the biopsy. We met with those doctors on a Thursday.  Tumor board wasn't meeting until Monday, so on Friday we decided to go take our kids to California while John was still healthy enough to go show them a good time at Disneyland and other parks.

We spent Friday night to Wednesday night as a family visiting Disneyland, SeaWorld, Legoland, California Adventure and the beach. We both had more fun and became more tired than you can imagine!

On Monday at Legoland we received the call with the results from the tumor board discussion.  They said that they were confident it was cancer, no biopsy needed, start chemo.

The doctor presented a possible chemo regimen to us the week before Disneyland.  When we got back, we found out that the insurance had denied it.  So she gave us a plan B chemo treament.  Yesterday when we went to see her, she had just gotten off the phone with the insurance company and they ended up agreeing to cover Plan A.  Plan A consists of 3 chemos.  (Sounds a lot better than the 5 John had last time!)  One of the chemos is one that John had before - Vincristine administered as an IV.  The other 2 will be new drugs for John-one is a pill, the other can be either IV or pill depending on insurance.  The schedule is 5 days on chemo.  2 weeks off.  Repeat 3 times.  Rescan to make sure the cancer is responding.  If the cancer responds, John will continue treatment for a minimum of 6 cycles and possibly up to 12 cycles.

Chemo started today, the 22nd.

Today all the drugs are IV because it all happened so fast they weren't able to get the one as a pill overnight. This week we will be at Huntsman every day for IV chemo. Next round, if the second pill gets approved, we will only have to come to Huntsman the first day for an IV and the rest of the week John can just take the pills at home. We are hopeful for pills because the side effects should be less aggressive in pill form than they would be in IV form.

We have been told that this chemo regiment shouldn't be as awful as last time.  The neutropenic fevers are not expected this time like they were last time.  And the chemo will either all be oupatient or at home. So we are hopeful that we won't have any or many overnight hospital stays.