Saturday, August 9, 2008

time for an update...

It has been an interesting and extremely busy week! We welcomed my friend and her daughter from Ohio for a few nights while they spent time with family in Saskatoon. It was so nice to see them but we were all so busy we had to have short mini-visits! As both of us were dealing with family medical issues we did the best we could and it was a pleasure to see them. We also had some time to visit with our good friends from Regina - again squeezed in the visits and tried our best to take advantage of quality, not quantity of time.

The oncologist appt on Wed was OK. This doctor mentioned that the last chest CT showed some new spots in the right lung, but reassured us that Callum really hadn't had enough rounds of chemo to accurately assess how he was responding to it. Dr. Ahmad wants the chemo to start again as soon as possible, and it would have started this coming week had it not been for the gamma knife surgery.

Callum will do some blood tests on the 18th, have a port put in on the 19th (it is a minor surgical procedure) and will start chemo on the 20th and 21st. It has been a nice break without chemo and neither of us are looking forward to the sickness that Callum experiences with it, but we are confident he was doing well on chemo before and are looking forward to a successful end of the treatment. His last blood test results were good - in fact - the cancer marker in the blood (CEA) was the lowest it has been in over a year and fully in the normal range.

We are in Manitoba and will meet with Dr. West and his team in Winnipeg on Monday morning. We will meet the nurses and doctors, he will have an exam, we will watch a video and we should be done by lunch. Then we will go back about 5:30 am on Wed morning to start the preparations for the gamma knife surgery. We are so excited to have this done so we can start to concentrate on the chemo treatments and whole brain radiation and getting him better. We have a long journey ahead...but we are looking forward to the future!

Keep up the positive thoughts and prayers....this is going to be an exciting week!!

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